Realities of Representation: State Building in Early Modern Europe and European America

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Realities of Representation

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Realities of Representation State Building in Early Modern E urope and E uropean America Edited by

Maija Jansson

REALITIES OF REPRESENTATION

© Maija Jansson, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7534–8 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7534–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Realities of representation : state building in Early Modern Europe and European America / edited by Maija Jansson. p. cm. Revisions of papers presented at a conference entitled Parliaments, Peoples, and Powers held at Yale University in 2005. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7534–5 (alk. paper) 1. Europe—Politics and government—1492–1648—Congresses. 2. Europe—Politics and government—1648–1789—Congresses. 3. United States—Politics and government—To 1775— Congresses. 4. Canada—Politics and government—18th century— Congresses. 5. Representative government and representation— History—Congresses. I. Jansson, Maija. D217.R37 2007 940.2⬘3—dc22

2006050340

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To all of the PPP participants—Ronald Asch, David Bell, Keith Brown, Harry Dickinson, Ramsay Cook, Jesús Escobar, Olga Dmitrieva, Ian Gentles, Jack Greene, Knud Jespersen, Jane Ohlmeyer, José Ignacio Fortea Pérez, Margaret Powell, Steven Pincus, Frank Prochaska, Paul Seaward, Gordon Turnbull, Frank Turner, William Vaughan, Keith Wrightson, and Robert Zaller—with thanks.


Contents List of Illustrations

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Notes on Contributors

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Introduction Realities of Representation: State Building in Early Modern Europe and European America Maija Jansson

1

Early Modern Europe England 1 The Representation of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain H.T. Dickinson

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2 Parliament and the Idea of Political Accountability in Early Modern Britain Paul Seaward

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3 Boroughmongering, Biography, and the Reform of Parliament: James Boswell and the Earl of Lonsdale Gordon Turnbull

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France 4 The Unrepresentable French? David A. Bell

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Germany 5 Noble Corporations and Provincial Diets in the Ecclesiastical Principalities of the Holy Roman Empire ca. 1648–1802 Ronald G. Asch

93

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C o n t e n ts

Ireland 6 Power, Politics and Parliament in Seventeenth-Century Ireland Jane Ohlmeyer

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Scandinavia 7 Repression and Representation: Political Culture in Early Modern Scandinavia Knud J.V. Jespersen

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Spain 8 An Unbalanced Representation: The Nature and Functions of the Cortes of Castile in the Habsburg Period (1538–1698) José Ignacio Fortea Pérez

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European America 9 Traditions of Consensual Governance in the Construction of State Authority in the Early Modern Empires in America Jack P. Greene

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10 Governing a Colony pas commes les autres: The Dilemmas of Unplanned Conquest Ramsay Cook

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Conclusion New Approaches to Early Modern Representation Steven Pincus

203

Afterword Representative Government: How Sure a Thing? Robert Zaller

215

Index

225

List of Illustrations

7.1 Map of Scandinavia 7.2 Sociopolitical Structure of Danish Society, ca. 1600 7.3 Model of the Danish Economic System, ca. 1600 7.4 The Swedish Constitutional System in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

134 138 139 142


Notes on Contributors

Ronald G. Asch is Professor of History at the University of Freiburg. He is a member of the advisory council of the German Historical Institute London and of the review board for history projects of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the central funding institution for research projects in German. He is the author of Der Hof Karls I. Politik, Provinz and Patronage 1625–1640 (1993); The Thirty Years war. The Holy Roman Empire and Europe 1618–1648 (1997); Nobilities in Transition, Courtiers and Rebels in Britain and Europe, ca. 1550–1700 (2003); and a short biography of James VI and I of Scotland and England, Jakob I. von England und Schottland: König des Friedens im Zeitalter der Religionskriege (1955). He has also coedited a number of books including Der Adel im Ancien Régime. Von der Krise der ständischen Monarchien bis zur Revolution ca. 1600–1789 (1993). David A. Bell is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. He received his AB from Harvard College, and his MA and PhD from Princeton University. A historian of France, he is the author of Lawyers and Citizens (Oxford University Press, 1994), The Cult of the Nation in France (Harvard University Press, 2001), The First Total War (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), and numerous articles. A contributing editor of The New Republic, he writes regularly for general interest magazines. He has held Fulbright, Chateaubriand, SSRC, ACLS, NEH, Wilson Center, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and has won the Gershoy Prize of the American Historical Association and the Pinkney Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies. Ramsey Cook is Emeritus Professor of History, York University, Adjunct Professor of History, University of Toronto, and General Editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography/Dictionnaire Biographique du Canada. He has held visiting professorships at both Harvard and Yale. His research interest is the history of relations between French and English Canadians and the evolution of nationalism in Quebec. His books include Canada, Quebec, and the Uses of Nationalism (1995) and Watching Quebec (2005).

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N ot e s o n C o n t r i bu to r s

H.T. Dickinson has taught at the University of Edinburgh since 1966 and he has been Richard Lodge Professor of British History since 1980. He is Concurrent Professor of History at Nanjing University in China and a former president of the Historical Association of Great Britain. He edited the journal History for eight years and he has authored or edited more than a dozen books including Bolingbroke, Walpole and the Whig Supremacy, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Britain and the American Revolution and Britain and the French Revolution 1789–1815. Jack P. Greene is Andrew W. Mellon Professor, Emeritus, at Johns Hopkins University. He has been a student of the transmission of representative institutions to the New World for more than half a century. For the topic under discussion, the most relevant of his books are The Quest for Power; The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (Chapel Hill, 1963), Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1789 (Athens, GA 1986), and Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, VA, 1994). Maija Jansson is Director, Yale Center for Parliamentary History, and Lecturer, Department of History at Yale. She is the editor of Proceedings in Parliament 1614 (House of Commons), American Philosophical Society Memoir (Philadelphia, 1988); Two Diaries of the Long Parliament (New York, 1984), and Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament, 7 vols. (Rochester, 2000–2007). She is a coeditor of the Yale editions of Proceedings in the Parliaments of 1625, 1626, and 1628 (11 volumes) as well as England and the North: The Russian Embassy of 1613–1614, American Philosophical Society Memoir (Philadelphia, 1994). Knud J.V. Jespersen is Professor of Early Modern and Modern European History at the University of Southern Denmark and also Royal Historiographer to HM the Queen of Denmark. He was a visiting fellow at Cambridge University in 1978 and visiting professor at Yale University in 1989. He has published numerous books and articles on early modern Scandinavian and European history and on World War II. Among his latest books published in English are, No Small Achievement. Special Operations Executive and the Danish Resistance, 1940–1945 (Denmark, 2002) and A History of Denmark (Houndsmill, UK, 2004).


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Jane Ohlmeyer is Erasmus Smith Professor of Modern History at Trinity College, Dublin. Her books include Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim 1609–1683 (Cambridge, UK, 1993; reprint, Dublin 2001); and the edited works Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, UK, 1995) and Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge, UK, 2000). She has also coedited The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland 1638–1660 (Oxford, 1998), The Irish Statute Staple Books, 1596–1687 (Dublin, 1998) and British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, UK, 2005). José Ignacio Fortea Pérez is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cantabria (Santander, Spain). He was a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University (1992–1993). He was Directeur d’études associé de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales of Paris (1998) and researcher at the Escuela Espa~nola de Historia y Arqueologia of Rome (2003). He is a member of the International Commission for the History of Towns and is currently researching urban history (fiscality, representative assemblies, and municipal government). He is the author of Córdoba en el siglo XVI: las bases demográficas y económicas de una expansion urbana (Córdoba, 1981) and Monarquía y Cortes en la Corona de Castilla. Las ciudades ante la política fiscal de Felipe II (Valladolid, 1992). He has been the editor of several collections of conference papers on urban history, including Imágenes de la diversidad. El mundo urbano en la Corona de Castilla, siglos XVI–XVIII (Santander, 1997) and Furor et rabies. Violencia conflicto y marginación en la Europa Moderna (Santander, 2002). Steven Pincus is Professor of History at Yale University. His work focuses on the social, intellectual, and political history of Early Modern Britain in European and Imperial contexts. He has published Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy (Cambridge, UK, 1996); England’s Glorious Revolution 1688–98 (New York, 2005) and has coedited with Alan Houston A Nation Transformed (Cambridge, UK, 2001) and with Peter Lake, The Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007). He is currently engaged in completing a book manuscript for Yale University Press, entitled, The First Modern Revolution. Paul Seaward has been Director, History of Parliament Trust, London, since 2001. His publications include The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Regime, 1661–1667 (Cambridge, UK,

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1989), apart from books and articles on the political history of the English Restoration, and the history of parliament and English political thought. He is currently working on an edition of Behemoth by Thomas Hobbes, and is the joint general editor of an edition of the works of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Gordon Turnbull has been, since 1997, General Editor of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell, overseeing the preparation of the volumes in the ongoing Research Series of Boswell’s correspondence, journals, and other papers, and the manuscript edition of the Life of Samuel Johnson. He has written and published extensively on Boswell and others in the Johnson circle, coedited (with the late Mary Hyde, Viscountess Eccles) James Boswell’s Book of Company at Auchinleck, 1792–1795, Roxburghe Club (Oxford, 1995), and recently contributed the entries on Boswell for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Robert Zaller is Professor of History at Drexel University. He is the author of The Parliament of 1621: A Study in Constitutional Conflict (Berkeley, 1971) and The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England (Stanford, 2007), and coeditor with Richard L. Greaves of the Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Sussex, UK, 1982).

Introduction

Realities of Representation: State Building in E arly Modern E urope and E uropean America Maija Jansson

I

n most accounts of the political history of early modern Europe, kings and queens, dynastic succession, and royal decisions dominate the story and form the core of the narrative. The rulers are remembered as icons of an age. Their names define periods—the Elizabethans, the Hapsburgs, and the Bourbons. And in each case archbishops and bishops connected with secular royalty loom large as the powerbrokers of the clerical sphere. The business of personal monarchy and clerical hierarchy, however, is not the whole story. Side by side with church and crown at this time were fledgling representative institutions struggling to maintain and even to expand the liberties and privileges confirmed by kings of earlier ages. These assemblies were a critical component of state building in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in many instances formed the foundations of institutions that still prevail. This book is about the idea of representation and the institutional realities that shaped it in early modern Europe and European America. The underlying themes of the story revealed here are continuity, flexibility, and variation. For, while the idea of representation of the body politic can be found in much of human history, certainly from the time of the Greeks, and maybe even before, the form it takes changes considerably over time and place. A country’s history, society, and national

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experience dictate how that idea is realized in political institutions, and what shape it eventually takes. Religion and language can also play a part, as they did in the formation of assemblies in German principalities, Canada and, to a certain extent, Ireland. The assemblies described in the chapters that follow—the cortes, diets, parlements, parliaments, riksdags, and reichstags—although nationally unique are similar in that they were all to a degree representative. Representative assemblies of this kind existed in virtually every part of Latin Christendom from the end of the twelfth century.1 During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they were dissolved, recalled, reinvented and reshaped by the experiences of absolute monarchy, civil war and revolution. Throughout these centuries, however, the idea of representation was never lost. It emerged as a lynchpin of enlightenment political thought and eighteenth-century constitutionalism. In examining these institutions or assemblies and their relationship to government and sometimes to revolution, we may come to new conclusions about the notion of sovereignty and the development of representation in emerging nation-states. The tension between monarchy and early representative institutions and their personnel provides its own dynamic for understanding early modern state building. In fact, there are two stories here. The first is about the institutions themselves and the powers they customarily claimed to tax and legislate, powers that in many cases ensured their very existence. The second is about membership in these bodies—was it elected? Were these representative bodies? If so, what was the property qualification for enfranchisement? Were the members responsible or accountable to those who elected them or to some larger collective as the nation? In other words, whose voices do we hear in the proceedings and debates of the various assemblies, and who did they represent? In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe those voices were generally not those of the peasants (Sweden was an exception) and yeoman, so often echoed by social historians, but rather those of the burghers, townspeople, clergy, landed aristocracy and, in England, the younger sons who contributed to the making up of the new merchant classes. They were the voices of men who participated in the business of government at all levels, clerical as well as secular, and who often in so doing clashed with the policies of the crown. As a result, the assemblies in which these men sat were in many cases dissolved by the crown, giving way to what have been described as periods of absolutism. Absolutism in practice, however, may never have been as absolute as the term implies and as some historians have claimed. The liberties and privileges born of the hierarchy of the feudal system and preserved in

R e a l i t i e s o f R e p r e s e n t at i o n

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ancient councils and charters granted to barons and cities alike, coupled with the idea of representation that was already taking shape at the end of the Middle Ages never quite died in the years when parliament, diet, or cortes were not summoned. They remained in political consciousness to provide the continuity and institutional experience for reviving bodies with similar claims when “absolutism” eventually gave way to more enlightened government. Indeed, it is through the assemblies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that we find the first examples of modern political representation, that is, of one person standing in for and acting on behalf of another, beginning to take shape. That concept of political representation and the concomitant principle of political accountability would come to fruition with the enlightenment and the eighteenth-century heyday of constitutionalism. It would be transported across the boundaries of Europe to the Atlantic continent and redefined to meet the requirements of English colonial governance in the Caribbean, New England and, after the Seven Years’ (French and Indian) War, what had been New France. Representation is a concept for which there are many meanings and some ambiguities.2 From the world of theater, art, and music notation we have one set of definitions; from the arena of political theory and social science, another.3 Even when we narrowly define the term as “ ‘political’ representation” its meaning can vary. We can speak, for example, of a king as a political head of state representing his country, or of an ambassador representing a state and its king; although a king was seldom elected and an ambassador was always appointed. Did they represent an idea of the nation as a collective unit of peoples or as singular individual subjects? Or did they metaphorically “embody their nations,” to borrow a phrase from David Bell?4 The same questions may be asked of assemblies—who did the members represent? In the Cortes of Castile we can emphatically say, the cities. In England it was the shires as well as the boroughs and towns. In the seventeenth century, we find in city records instructions to MPs regarding voting on bills that would have an impact on the population of those places in question. Those burgesses were responsible to a certain extent to their constituencies. In early eighteenth-century Britain, every MP was believed to represent “all the British people,” not only those who had voted for him but also those who had voted against him.5 Conversely, every individual in the country was represented by both his MP and the whole House of Commons, although this idea was challenged in Britain by the end of the century. Across the Atlantic, James Madison wrote in The Federalist papers in 1788 that we see a “total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity” in the American government, but not “the total exclusion of representatives of the people.”6

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It is difficult to pinpoint the first occurrence of political representation as we think of it. And we are not to confuse the idea of representation with that of early or direct democracy, wherein the entire population participated. The Greeks had no word for representation. In three instances in the Politics Aristotle implies a procedure somewhat akin to electing a representative in the modern sense of the word, but the concept of the responsibility of that representative to act for those who elected him is absent.7 We find similar descriptions of elections and practices in Rome as the empire expanded. The Romans, however, had a term for representation in Latin, representare, which is the origin of the English word, but again to them it did not convey the meaning of one person standing in for and acting on behalf of another person or persons. In the Middle Ages men were elected to early church councils and assemblies of town councils and guilds but generally they were elected to discuss, consult, and advise rather than to represent the person or the position of those doing the electing, or, to use a nineteenth-century term, the constituency, however that was defined. The late sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries constituted a formative period for the countries represented here: England, France, and Germany with its multistate particularism, Ireland, the Scandinavian states of Sweden and Denmark, Spain, the Atlantic colonies and what we now call French Canada. In France and England, kings lost their heads over the nature of government. In Denmark, there was a long period of absolutism during which no representative assembly was convened. In France, the Estates General after being called in 1614 was not summoned again for 175 years. The Spanish Cortes, strong in the sixteenth century, was weakened by rebellion and dissolved at the end of the seventeenth amid the complexities of financing a composite monarchy. Some German principalities maintained a vigorous parliamentary tradition; others failed. Scotland and Ireland ultimately lost their parliaments to union with Britain. In the American colonies where land was plentiful and commerce ever-expanding settlers demanded a government where their voices would be heard. They sought guarantees “that men of their standing would not be governed without consultation.”8 After the Seven Years’ War Canada struggled with the problems of a French Catholic population and a British Protestant ruler. The chapters that follow should serve as a beginning and not an end to the study of the realities of representation. They should raise questions about local and national assemblies, the complexities of representation, particularly in relationship to democracy, and why the idea persists into the twenty-first century, if it does. Let us begin with a few, brief notes that place the chapters within a historical context.


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England In England the institution of parliament reaches back at least to the thirteenth century. Compared with similar French assemblies, it was a model of stability. Nevertheless that stability was tested in the early seventeenth century during the reigns of the first Stuart Kings. Charles I succeeded to the throne on the death of his father, James I, in 1625. He summoned parliament in 1625, 1626, and 1628. In 1629 he dissolved the session that he had summoned the year before, and did not convene another until financial trouble drove him to it in the spring of 1640. This particular period of little more than a decade without the meeting of parliament has come to be called the period of personal rule and was England’s flirtation with absolutism. Parliament’s customary control of the powers of taxation, however, guaranteed its recall. It met for a short session in the spring of 1640, and then what came later to be called the Long Parliament was convened in the autumn of that year and technically continued until March 16, 1660. During those two decades, the Long Parliament was purged, expelled, recalled, expelled again and recalled before its dissolution. At the same time, England dispensed with monarchy, established a true commonwealth for a brief period, ushered in the rule of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector and, in 1660, parliament became the vehicle for the restoration of Charles II. Indeed, through the passage of the Triennial Act and the Act of Continuation in the spring of 1641, parliament had acquired the power to summon and dissolve a session. For the first time a power that had rested solely with the crown was shared with the legislative arm of government. In 1688, the settlement of the Glorious Revolution ensured that sovereignty was shared among King, Lords, and Commons in the reshaped mixed monarchy. The legacy of the civil wars and the Glorious Revolution was an awakening of thought about government in general and English government in particular. Thomas Hobbes, Algernon Sydney, and John Locke in the seventeenth century and later, in the eighteenth, people such as Edmund Burke, William Gladstone, John Cartwright, John Wilkes, and Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about parliament and representation. In the beginning of the eighteenth century H.T. Dickinson, in chapter 1, tells us that the issue in the minds of Englishmen was less one of representation than of constitutionalism. They took pride in their constitution “that was designed to ensure that executive power was restrained, the rule of law preserved, and the subjects protected.” They believed in a restricted franchise of property owners, knowing

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that those who owned property and were men of education could best be trusted with choosing representatives of the people who would understand taxation and law. As Dickinson puts it, the franchise needed to be restricted to “men of independent means” in order to ensure that the multitude of “lower orders” did not control the vote. Defenders of the constitution, he tells us, believed that the Commons should represent “property and not persons” and this principle was confirmed in law by the Landed Qualification Act of 1711. At the same time members of the Commons were understood to represent all of England and their interests to be those of society at large, “interwoven with those of quite humble voters and even more humble non-voters.” There was little interest in the early eighteenth century in a broader system of representation that was believed might serve to upset the constitutional balance of King, Lords, and Commons in parliament. A movement toward that end came only at the close of the century, influenced perhaps by the revolutions in France and America and the writings of men such as John Cartwright who supported a wider franchise that “ought to be attached to the person and not the property of man.” Elections, and franchise being the issue, as Dickinson says, the interest in reform at that time did not spill over to the greater questions of “monarchy, aristocracy, or hereditary right to rule.” We cannot think about the idea of representation without raising the question of political accountability. What or who ensured that a representative would truly represent? It is an issue of universal importance and can be raised with regard to the assemblies of every country included in this book. Paul Seaward addresses the question with regard to England. He explains how the traditional powers of taxation held by most assemblies were linked to the idea of fiscal accountability. Accurate record keeping and defined collection procedures guaranteed that taxes were received by the Exchequer or Treasury and did not (for the most part) stray into private pockets. By the 1660s, with the extraordinary taxes levied to maintain the wars against the Dutch, accountability was imperative. Seaward explains that somewhere in the late seventeenth century the ideas of fiscal and political accountability became “conceptually linked,” the one perhaps serving as a precedent for the other. We can find an example of corruption in the electoral process where political accountability was strained, to say the least, in the career of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale. The Earl, as described by James Boswell, the famous biographer of Samuel Johnson, shows us something about eighteenth-century politicians and county elections. Boswell himself had hoped to stand for parliament but


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“the notoriously tyrannical and ill-tempered” Lonsdale brought the plan to an end ultimately threatening a duel with Boswell. Lonsdale was described by contemporaries as a “boroughmonger,” that is, one who trades in parliamentary seats for boroughs.9 His character, described by Gordon Turnbull, combined an “obsessive need for social power” with a drive for “wider political and commercial dominance.” Turnbull says he embodied “the untrammeled will of both propertied commercial interests and the nobility” and “represents the annihilation of British ‘liberty.’ ” Lonsdale controlled coal mines and trading fleets in northern England. He apparently had no desire to rise higher in government but was content to dominate local politics. What is interesting in this particular case is that Lonsdale’s managing of local politics may have driven Boswell into the camp of John Wilkes who, “made the British eighteenth century’s first important call for a radical extension of, and a more democratic version of electoral franchise,” an idea whose time would come with the reforms of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless it was men of the same ilk as Lonsdale who provided the catalyst for reform of representation of towns and boroughs that culminated in the Reform Act of 1832.

France The history of representation in France is far more complicated in theory and practice than that of England. David Bell begins by providing a framework for understanding what the French meant by the term and how it was related to the conceptualization of the kingdom as a whole. He describes two concepts. In the first, the kingdom was thought “to take visible shape in an assembly” where there is a “pre-existing unity of will.” That scheme, Bell identifies as one of “metaphorical embodiment” and in it the “unity of will” negates the possibility of any wide divergence of thought. On the other hand, in a scheme of “liberal delegation” a group of individuals chooses another group to stand in for them as representatives, in a rather traditional way, not bound by any “unity of will.” Bell further distinguishes types of representation as “active” and “passive.” In active representation assembly members could express the will of the kingdom and act on it. Passive representation, as the word implies, limited the role of the members of an assembly to a kind of advisory capacity. They were able to “express the will of the kingdom” to the executive authority, in this case to the French king, but to do nothing further. In the sixteenth century, the king “who was the metaphorical head of the body politic” governed in conjunction with the Estates General, the

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body politic itself. This “conceptually coherent, elegant, and powerful” system that Bell explains through Catholic thought and terminology, could not withstand the religious conflicts that ensued after the reformation. The influence of the Estates General waned and was finally dissolved in 1615 which gave rise to the expansion of the monarchy during the whole of the seventeenth century. The king alone eventually came to represent the kingdom, as Louis XIV said later, “the nation . . . resides in its entirety in the person of the king.” To put it another way, L’etat, c’est moi. Alongside the increasingly strong monarch, however, were also the parlements or law courts, that were able to “remonstrate” with the king in a consultatory way. These parlements grew as passive voices, that is, as “counselors of royal authority” but never as cosovereigns as in a sense was the earlier Estates General. This compromise provided “wealth and positions of power close to the newly absolute monarchy”—the rise of the nobility of the robe. A similar compromise occurred in Ireland, as Jane Ohlmeyer describes. Athough, as she quotes Hugh Kearney, “the Irish robe went to Hell or to Connacht, the French robe to Heaven and to Versailles.”10 The parlements never emerged as representative bodies (albeit with limited representation) in the British sense, and bore little responsibility for making laws. By the eighteenth century, France, as the rest of Europe, was caught up in the Enlightenment movement. Treatises on government and social contract addressed the issue of representation, one that Rousseau “thundered against” in favor of direct democracy similar to the Greek model. Toward the end of the century, when the state became bankrupt and collapsed there was, as Bell tells us, no coherent system of representation from the past to serve as precedent. During the revolution various schemes were effected—the recall of the Estates General, the summoning of the National Assembly, and a National Convention—all of which failed. Ultimately, Bell concludes, “the French were not so much unrepresentable as over-represented in a number of often contradictory ways.”

Germany In Germany, as a result of that country’s many principalities and dominions that had been strengthened after the death of Frederick II in 1250 and the subsequent collapse of the empire, there were many councils and diets in provincial localities. These bodies were both secular and ecclesiastical, that is, they were composed of estates tied to the lands of both princes and bishops. The imperial parliament (Reichstag) that had met intermittently from the Middle Ages was


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summoned by Emperor Leopold I in 1663 and remained in session until the dissolution of the empire in 1806. The provincial diets of many German states (Landtags), however, did not fare so well, and were particularly crippled during the Thirty Years War when taxation became a matter dictated from the top rather than through local assemblies. In Baden-Durlach, for example, the last diet was held in 1668; that of Holstein last met in 1675. On the other hand, a number of local bodies lasted longer, such as those of Mecklenburg and Württemberg, and Cleves and Mark in Prussia. It is clear that the experiences in German assemblies and councils varied, raising questions about the form and degree that absolutism took in that country. Professor Asch tells us that even where the rulers were strong, as the Hohenzollern in Brandenburg and Prussia, they “were forced to seek a compromise with the traditional noble elites and were generally careful not to attack their local power.” In areas where diets no longer met, noble corporations survived and “preserved the collective memory of ancient privileges.” One reason for this, as Asch points out, is that the local assemblies in Germany were not simply political entities but were also “centers of sociability,” somewhat as we perceive the eighteenth-century House of Commons to have been. Consequently, there was a real interest on the part of the nobility in keeping provincial representative assemblies alive. In Germany’s ecclesiastical principalities, “headed by elected princes who wore a mitre instead of a crown,” the issue of governance and assemblies was somewhat different. That world was described by Asch as “a world of complicated and jealously guarded privileges, of intricate social hierarchies and of regional autonomy.” Another historian commenting on Asch’s work describes the world of ecclesiastical principalities as one in which seemingly contradictory characteristics of “aristocratic republics ruled by the church elite recruited from the nobility disguised as clergy, where the bishops played the roles of secular princes”11 were combined. However described, these assemblies were apparently indispensable to the secular and ecclesiastical ruling elite. In northwestern Germany, where the bishoprics were tied to the hands of local noble families, the territorial diets survived and even, we are told, sometimes prospered. Through these diets the nobility were able to obtain rich benefices for members of their families. One’s noble ancestry was the key to membership in the diet—the more ancient the line, the easier the path to the noble estates. Here we see that in the ecclesiastical principalities the members of the estates, as “representatives of the rulers’ subjects” in many instances also held offices in the civil and ecclesiastical administration. In this sense, by

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the eighteenth century, these principalities had become a “perfect counter-model to absolutism” demonstrating “what government by and for the estates of the nobility meant.”

Ireland The experience of Irish parliaments and assemblies is, of course, closely tied in this period to English policy and crown government. In fact Ireland provides, according to a historian of the country, “the only example of the exportation of English institutions prior to England’s acquisition of colonies in North America.”12 The Kingship Act of 1541 defined Ireland in terms of the English crown as an “imperial kingdom,” although the interpretation of that term was different in each country. It was the earlier Poynings Law, however, of 1494, as Jane Ohlmeyer tells us, that shaped “the constitutional relationship between Ireland, the English council and, above all, the English King.” By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the issue of representation had also become one of religious dominance in Ireland itself. It was connected with social divisions between old and new English, Catholics and Protestants, and wealth. The Catholic majorities of the Elizabethan parliaments gradually gave way to Protestant representation as political power shifted from “the Anglo-Irish Catholic ruling elite” to a Protestant ascendancy, and with it came a new patronage system. By 1613 Protestants held a majority in the Lower House. That majority grew substantially in the 1630s as Sir Thomas Wentworth, Lord Deputy of Ireland, increasingly sought to control elections in order to mold the parliament into an effective tool of English government. Ironically, though, Ohlmeyer tells us, that while Wentworth was building a political base the Irish were claiming their rights as “a free people” “to be governed only according to the common law of England and the statutes made and established by the parliament in this kingdom of Ireland.” The Earl of Castlehaven, for example, wrote that “the only way the nation had to express their loyalty and prevent their being misrepresented to their sovereign” was through parliament.13 Following civil war in late 1641 a series of confederate assemblies supplanted parliament. These bodies, with few exceptions, were based on the parliamentary model. The confederate experiment, however, was short-lived. At the time of the restoration of the English king, an entirely Protestant Lower House was elected to the new Irish parliament. At the same time, Catholics were readmitted to the Upper House. Religion continued to exacerbate tensions with England.


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While this was a matter of no small importance to Ireland it was increasingly of little concern to Britain whose new focus was her colonial empire in America. The issue of Catholicism in Ireland, however, never carried the language dimension that it did in Canada. Gaelic speakers or “native Irish” had been excluded from parliamentary elections right at the outset.

Scandinavia The two-state formation of modern Scandinavia was unique. We learn at the outset from Knud Jespersen something about the similarities and differences between the kingdom of Sweden-Finland and the twin monarchy of Denmark-Norway. Both states were multinational and both were secular Protestant societies. The rivalry between the two for control of the Baltic continued over two centuries, and Jespersen attributes the eventual triumph of Sweden in that regard to the mode of representation in the Swedish Riksdag (national parliament). Denmark, until 1660, was ruled by an elected monarchy and state council of ten to twenty members of the aristocracy. A newly elected king was confirmed by the regional popular assemblies (the lansting), although the confirmation appears to have been a simply pro forma ratification. This system apparently worked well as long as the government was able to finance its business. Things changed, however, in 1625 when Denmark became actively involved in the Thirty Years’ War and the government was forced to levy regular taxes. The result, as one might guess, was growing social unrest among the nonnoble estates, a situation similar to the German experience. To combat the unrest an Assembly of Estates was revived in 1627 “with representatives from all estates in society.” War, however, remained the perpetual antagonist. The 1657–60 conflict with Sweden bankrupted the state; the old institutions collapsed and were replaced with “a monolithic absolutist constitution that would last for 189 years.” Jespersen tells us that the monarchy and council fell “because of the lack of an adequate representative system.” He adds however, that “the introduction of absolutism hardly influenced the daily life of the common people.” In contrast, Sweden had a “well-developed representative political system.” All the estates, including the peasants, had seats in the Riksdag. Through “a positive contract with the people” Gustav Vasa, in 1544, ensured the continuity of both crown and Riksdag by agreeing that the latter should legitimize the former. From then until 1682, the political system of Sweden could be described as a monarchia mixta. As a result of this cooperation between branches of government, an

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efficient, advanced military machine could be built without undermining the support and goodwill of society. Sweden’s military prowess that guaranteed her hegemonic power in the Baltic region can then be directly attributed to the spirit and efficiency of the Riksdag.

Spain During the Middle Ages in Spain the Cortes of Castile was regularly summoned by the king for fiscal reasons. The law of 1367 had stipulated that “neither taxes nor tributes” could be levied throughout the kingdom except by that body. By the fifteenth century, however, representation in the cortes had come to be pretty much limited to proctors, that is, representatives sent from the cities. Although this system ensured that the voices of the cities were heard by the crown, it was not without problems. Tensions arose over the perspectives of the two: the cities focused on local and particular needs while the cortes tended to address those broad and general interests concerning the welfare of the whole kingdom. Out of these tensions a procedure emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whereby, after general debate on issues in the cortes, regarding fiscal matters particularly, a kind of “consultative” vote was taken that was afterward ratified by a “decisive” vote in the city council. This process, José Ignacio Fortea Pérez tells us, served to highlight the preeminence of the local cities over the cortes with the result that “each summoning of the Cortes gave rise to a tug-of-war between the cities and the crown over the extent of the powers of the proctors.” The Habsburgs had inherited this system of city representation built on old established practices, and then honed and shaped it to their own needs. Probably the most noteworthy change they made, Fortea Pérez tells us, was to exclude the nobility and clergy from the cortes. Some historians would argue that this action would have immediately paved the way for royal absolutism in Castile and that, indeed, that may have been the purpose of the exclusion. Fortea Pérez argues differently, however, because, as he explains, there was little new in that policy. The clergy and aristocracy had been excluded before. Moreover, he says, discussion and negotiation continued separately outside of the cortes, guaranteeing that the voices of these groups, although excluded from the assembly were still represented to the crown, simply in a different venue. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Cortes of Castile met often and developed procedurally as an institution, also enlarging itself with two new branches. These new components, the


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Diputación del Reino and the Comisión de Millones would eventually evolve into a single institution after 1698. Thus, as another historian puts it, “In Castile, the withering of the cortes as a central institution by which the monarch obtained the consent of his people to taxation did not mean also the withering of the principle of representation; simply its atomization.”14 Consequently, even after the dissolution of the cortes, during the period of absolutism that followed, we find the remnants of an administrative institution with representative elements. Taxation was the area where cooperation between the crown and the kingdom was most necessary. The custom of the cities voting only a “consultative” voice in the cortes, that was later legitimized by a decisive vote in the urban council prolonged the process of granting subsidies. The delays were costly, requiring that salaries be paid during the whole process of the voting. As the subsidy demands of the crown became more frequent over the years the system bogged down. Questions arose over the allegiance of the proctors: were they more ministers of the kingdom or agents of the cities? As increased subsidies and greater taxes were required by the crown more questions were raised about their use. As Fortea Pérez tells us, “the taxes were only justified if their establishment was directed towards the common good.” In 1624 the cities refused to pass a large subsidy, leading to the introduction of reform measures for fiscal policy. Ultimately those measures failed. From 1642 until 1655 no new subsidies were demanded. The cortes ceased to be summoned after the death of Philip IV in 1665. Under Mariana of Austria, regent to Charles II, Philip’s son and successor, the Institutions of the Diputación and the Comisión evolved as subsidy-granting bodies. They were not, however, empowered to create new taxes. Eventually the Diputación was absorbed into the Comisión which was put in the hands of the king’s minister of finance.

European America European America, to use Jack Greene’s phrase, comprehends for our purpose the colonies of the British and French along the whole sweep of the North Atlantic coast and beyond, from the Caribbean Islands to the boundaries of New France discussed in Ramsay Cook’s work. During the early modern period in Europe, Greene tells us, the emerging states had neither “the coercive resources” necessary to establish control in the new world colonies nor the “financial wherewithal to mobilize such resources.” As a result private charters and trading companies were encouraged to take part in exploration and

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colonization. Many of these companies were as lacking in resources, however, as were their governments. As a result it was generally individuals rather than “colonial organizers or licensers” who were actually responsible for the colonizing process. These individuals acquired land, often in substantial acreage, and in so doing achieved an independence not possible in Europe. For them, it was imperative that their interests be represented in the newly forming governments. They brought their laws and institutions with them, and, as Greene tells us, their “deepest aspirations” to retain their identities as formed by European society. For the English in the West Indies, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and North America this meant an “identity as a free people,” who owed their freedom to a long tradition of the theory of governance by rule of law. They sought to replicate the English parliamentary system in the new colonies. The assembly of Virginia very early on claimed “the right to consent to all taxes levied on the inhabitants of Virginia.” Greene says that within twenty years of the founding of each colony, representative assemblies were formed by the inhabitants. These assemblies and legislatures, he continues, emphasized independence from the executive power on the other side of the Atlantic, an arrangement that caused few problems while England was preoccupied with civil war at home. Ultimately the Glorious Revolution in 1688 ensured for the new world, as it did for the old, the permanence of representative government. Accordingly, at the time of the American Revolution, there were twenty-five functioning provincial parliaments, Greene says (not counting Ireland), in the British colonies. These assemblies, modeled on the British system, yet born in the new world and shaped by the colonial experience, “diverged considerably” from the English example. The colonial empire produced elements of indirect rule that defined the parameters of central power, thus ensuring a sufficient degree of local self government through the assemblies in the provinces. Tensions occurred that often led to outright resistance when officials of the colonial administration violated the principles on which these local assemblies rested.

Canada The story of the early settlements in French Canada and the idea of representation in New France took a turn when the Seven Years’ (French and Indian) War ended with the British victory over France. The victors and the vanquished were separated by both language and religion. As Ramsay Cook states, there were “some 65,000 Frenchspeaking Catholics” living under a system of French laws who, in 1763, became subjects of an English Protestant King.


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How would the English govern these new subjects who, in the mother country, as Catholics, would have been denied office and considered suspect under the Test Act? Who would represent them in England? The Articles of Capitulation signed in 1760 assured the French “free exercise” of Catholicism and the continuation of the laws and usages according to the custom of Paris. Three years following the military conquest, however, in the formation of a civil government in Quebec, the British drew on the experience of their other North American colonies. As in New England, Quebec was to be provided with an elected assembly and a framework through which a reformed Catholic church, it was believed, would be absorbed into the Church of England. The assembly failed as did the scheme for the church. The French, who in 1764 numbered about 70,000, were not permitted to vote. It is interesting to note, however, that in Grenada, another French colony that had been conquered by the British, the Test Act was suspended by 1765, and Catholics were permitted citizenship. Various plans continued to be discussed for the government of Canada. By the Quebec Act of 1774 there would be no assembly, but, as Cook points out, the French legal system and church were guaranteed and Roman Catholics were eligible to be part of the Governor’s Council. There was no stipulation, however, in the Quebec Act about language. At the time of the American Revolution disaffected loyalists flocked to Canada raising hopes among the British of the possibility of a government there that would reflect the “rights of Englishmen.” The loyalists now were joined by the French who envisioned an assembly where both English and French would be represented. Ten years after the British victory, as Cook points out, “class rather than language and religion” had become the political issue. In 1791, William Grenville devised a plan that he believed would give political and cultural representation to both sides. He was responsible for drafting the Constitutional Act that divided the old Province of Quebec into two. Lower Canada was to remain Canadian, that is, old French; Upper Canada was to be dominated by English-speaking settlers and loyalists. This act explicitly reversed the earlier British belief that eventually the French settlers would assimilate British culture and government, and provided them as French settlers an active voice in the assembly. It was a stunning reversal, “a realistic compromise between pragmatism and constitutional principle.” The British knew that there were far fewer of themselves than there were of the French Canadians. As Cook concludes, these predominant French Canadians “rather than being assimilated, assimilated parliamentary institutions and made them their own.”

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Ultimately all of the national experiences described in this book turn on the matter of sovereignty, the locus of state power, and the voice of the people—the very subjects of the great political writers and theorists of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Did ultimate power to govern rest in the crown or the assembly, or both? Where did “the people” fit in and how were they to be represented? The last chapter by Steven Pincus sums up the issues and draws some conclusions about these questions. In the Afterword, Robert Zaller, provides food for thought in addressing the general issue of the future of representative governments. The chapters of this book grew out of papers delivered at a conference entitled Parliaments, Peoples, and Power held at Yale University in 2005, organized by the Yale Center for Parliamentary History and also generously supported by Charles Long, Deputy Provost and Barbara Shailor, Deputy Provost for the Arts; Amy Meyers, Director of the Yale Center for British Art; Frank Turner, Director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and Margaret Powell, Director of The Lewis Walpole Library. The editor thanks them all, and also Alan Solomon, currently Head of Research Services in Sterling Library, and Abraham Parrish, archivist in the Map Collection for their graciously granting permission to print the images of the maps on the dust jacket. The chapters are arranged alphabetically by country. It is hoped that these studies will provide a key to further understanding representation and institutions that continue to be reexamined and reshaped by current political thought, even when they have been historically defined by constitutions.

Notes 1. A.R. Meyers, Parliaments and Estates in Europe to 1789 (London, 1975), p. 24. Regarding the history of assemblies during this period, see also Michael A.R. Graves, The Parliaments of Early Modern Europe (New York, 2001). 2. For the broadest discussion of the idea of representation, see Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley, 1967). 3. These are not finely delineated categories. The impact of political representation in the early modern period in architecture, for example, is visible in the movement away from royal palaces to assembly halls and city councils. With regard to Spain, for example, the work of Jesús Escobar traces the development of the Plaza Mayor and the places of government in Madrid to ideas of representation. See The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge, UK, 2004) and “The Places of Government in Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and Urbanism,”


4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

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unpublished paper, Parliaments, Peoples, and Power conference, Yale University, April 2005. David A. Bell, The Unrepresentable French? See chapter 4, this volume, pp. 76–77 H.T. Dickinson, The Representation of the People in EighteenthCentury Britain, see chapter 1, this volume, p. 29. James Madison, The Federalist, 63, March 1, 1788 (Library of America, 1999), p. 350. See The Politics of Aristotle, ed. and trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford, 1958), bk. IV, 13 (p. 192 and 192n2); bk. VI, 1 (p. 260, 260n2, and 263). Jack P. Greene, Traditions of Consensual Governance in the Construction of State Authority in the Early Modern European Empires in America, see chapter 9, this volume, p. 173. Oxford English Dictionary. Jane Ohlmeyer, Power, Politics, and Parliament in Seventeenthcentury Ireland, see chapter 6, this volume, p. 123. Olga Dmitrieva, Professor of History, Moscow State University, unpublished comments, Parliaments, Peoples, and Power conference, Yale University, April 7–9, 2005. T.W. Moody, as cited in Jane Ohlmeyer, Power, Politics and Parliament in Seventeenth-Century Ireland, see chapter 6, this volume, p. 115. Quoted from Castlehaven’s memoirs as cited by Jane Ohlmeyer, see, chapter 6, in this volume, p. 114. Ian Gentles, Professor of History, York University, Toronto, unpublished comments, Parliaments, Peoples and Power conference, Yale University, April 7–9, 2005.


Chapter 1

The Representation of the People in E ighteenth-Century Britain H.T.Dickinson

W

hile today our first question about any system of representation would be to ask whether it is democratic, in eighteenth-century Britain the central question was whether it was constitutional. The primary concern of most of the population was not whether the whole adult population was directly and effectively represented in parliament, but whether the electoral system produced representatives who could ensure that the power of the executive was limited and restrained, the interests of the most important sectors of society were served, the rule of law was preserved, the liberties of the subject were protected, and MPs were accountable to those who chose them as their representatives. In the eighteenth century, most British people took great pride in their constitution that they regarded as the envy of the civilized world. To make a reality of the theoretical virtues of this constitution, to ensure that the executive power was neither absolute nor arbitrary, to preserve the rule of law, and to protect the liberties of the people, it was argued then that the House of Commons had to defend its privileges, maintain its independence of monarch and aristocracy, and represent the interests of the people. To operate effectively in practice, a powerful and independent House of Commons had to serve as the representative of the people and as the bulwark of their liberties.1 To assess whether the British people were or were not properly represented under their eighteenth-century constitution,

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we need to examine the electoral system as it operated at the time, to explore how the actual system of representation was defended by its supporters, and to investigate what reforms were proposed by those who believed that the representation of the people was inadequate and needed to be improved.

The Electoral System The right to vote in parliamentary elections throughout the eighteenth century was restricted to adult males who possessed certain property qualifications. In the counties, the franchise was possessed by freeholders who owned land valued for taxation purposes at forty shillings (i.e., two pounds) per annum. In the boroughs, the franchise varied, ranging from members of the town council alone, through all freemen possessing certain properties and privileges, to all householders paying certain specified local rates and taxes. In the early eighteenth century, the total electorate in England and Wales was about 300,000 men, about 23 percent of the adult male population. By the late eighteenth century the total electorate had increased to about 400,000 voters, but this amounted to only about 17 percent of adult males because of the growth in population.2 The total and the percentage were much lower in Scotland, where there were only about 3,000 voters. The larger English counties had thousands of voters. In a handful of English boroughs 40 percent or more of the adult males possessed the vote, and in a significant number of boroughs the proportion was about 25 percent. Most voters across the whole country were drawn from the middling ranks of society, though about 15 percent of voters were drawn from the poorer sections of society.3 In nearly all English constituencies the voters possessed two votes. Even in the smallest of these constituencies, the local aristocratic patron could usually command only one of these votes. The electors usually cherished their right to the franchise and desired to exercise some control over how their votes were cast.4 In the smaller constituencies they expected to be asked for their vote and to be rewarded in some manner for disposing of it as the local elite requested. In the larger constituencies they often prided themselves on their political independence. They might rebel against powerful patrons who sought to dictate how they should use their votes or even reject a sitting Member of Parliament (MP), who had not appeared to represent their interests in the House of Commons.5 The propertied elite certainly made determined efforts to dominate parliamentary elections and in the many small borough constituencies, they could usually ensure that their candidates were

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elected at the polls, often without an actual contest. Only in the minority of large county and borough constituencies, where the number of voters ran into the thousands, did really serious contests, clearly involving an appeal to the views of the voters, take place. Parliamentary elections were very expensive to contest and MPs required substantial property qualifications to sit in parliament. Following the act of 1711 parliamentary candidates had to own landed property to the value for taxation purposes of £600 per annum to represent a county constituency and £300 per annum to represent a borough constituency.6 Therefore, only rich men were supposed to sit in the House of Commons. These facts do not mean, however, that the voters could be taken entirely for granted by powerful local patrons or wealthy candidates. All candidates competing in the larger constituencies and even patrons seeking to manage the smaller constituencies had to woo the voters. Electors were canvassed and courted, treated and flattered, even when no contested poll was expected. In the larger constituencies the candidates had to spend a great deal of time, energy, and money to canvass the electors and to get the voters to the polls. While the direct bribing of voters was extremely rare, candidates and their aristocratic patrons were expected to place their economic resources, social status, and political influence at the service of the voters. They were expected to spend money in their constituencies to benefit the voters, to contribute generously to the erection of public buildings and the creation of local amenities, and to distribute charity when times were hard. Whenever possible they were also expected to help their constituents to secure minor government posts and contracts, leases of land and property, and access to local schools and hospitals. They refrained from treating the voters as servile dependants, but sought instead to earn their gratitude by the skillful deployment of their patronage and influence. Wise patrons and candidates tried to influence the voters by using great tact and making careful preparations. They accepted that electoral deference had to be earned, and could not be commanded. Any MP who neglected his constituents after the election might well find it difficult to retain his seat at the following election.7 Electoral activity was never confined solely to those constituencies that went to the polls or even to those men qualified to cast a vote. Even small constituencies and safe seats were carefully nursed and regularly canvassed so that they remained loyal. When a poll was required, the voters could expect benefits and favors in return for the political service that they were being expected to perform. They were transported to the polls free of charge, provided with food and drink, even accommodation

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if they had come from some distance, and reimbursed for the expense of taking time off their work to travel and to cast their votes. Contested elections in the larger constituencies could extend over several days, even up to two weeks, on occasion. This increased the political excitement and, since voting was in public and each vote had to be orally expressed, these elections could draw in excited spectators who were not even qualified to vote. Such elections became a public spectacle and even an emotionally charged theatrical event. Music, effigies, gun salutes, firework displays, bonfires and bell-ringing—as well as a great deal of eating and drinking—could enliven proceedings and entertain the whole community. As a form of street theater, parliamentary elections drew many voters and many nonvoters into the accompanying crowds, audiences, processions, and celebrations. Sometimes these festivities could get out of hand and degenerate into electoral riots when the social order was temporarily inverted.8 Contested elections were more numerous in the earlier and later decades of the eighteenth century. In most contested elections, the voters were primarily concerned with local issues and they expected their MPs to represent their local interests in parliament. Most parliamentary legislation was about local issues and hence constituencies expected their representatives to take a keen interest in legislation that might directly affect the local community.9 National interests and issues impinged on parliamentary elections only when the political elite themselves were sharply divided along ideological, religious, or party lines or when the nation faced a major crisis at home or abroad. When such issues split the elite, the votes of the electorate were worth more to rival candidates than normally they would be and the voters could gain more benefits for putting them at the disposal of these candidates. Political tensions also allowed the voters in the larger constituencies, even greater independence from the governing elite seeking their votes. The voters expected more from their representatives in the House of Commons and they were more willing to advise their MP on how to vote in parliament. By the late eighteenth century, voters in some thirty or forty large constituencies were ready to put up and vote for independent or even politically radical candidates.10

Defending the System of Representation Although the electoral system in eighteenth-century Britain was by no means democratic, it was more open and it was certainly less corrupt than has often been supposed. As we shall see, it had its critics, mainly in the later eighteenth century, but throughout the century it was


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strongly defended by a very clear majority of the political elite, by a majority of the propertied classes, and by a great deal of public comment in speech and in print. Not surprisingly, a social hierarchy dominated by men of property was ready to defend an electoral system that did so much to represent the interests of property. Most eighteenth-century political commentators believed that the British constitution provided the people with a government that was based on consent. The rule of law was established, the people were free from arbitrary tyranny, and the constitution was legitimate because Britain possessed a representative institution that was an essential and integral part of the sovereign legislature. The House of Commons voted the financial supplies without which effective government was impossible. Its control of the purse strings enabled it to influence if not to direct the policies of the executive. This power also enabled the House of Commons both to restrain and to judge the actions of the executive, to promote legislative measures beneficial to the people at large, to represent the grievances of the people to those in power, and to safeguard the liberty and property of all subjects. Commentators boasted that the British were “the wisest and greatest people on earth,” who lived under “the safest and best government in the world,” because they chose men committed to the disposal and protection of their life, liberty and property.11 There were frequent references to the British constitution being based on the consent of a free people.12 The government’s right to command rested on the consent of the people primarily and most directly because the members of the House of Commons were elected by those men who possessed the constitutional right to vote in parliamentary elections. Although the eighteenth-century British certainly regarded the House of Commons as the democratic element in Britain’s mixed government and balanced constitution, this did not lead them all to support a democratic electoral system. While it was accepted that government was instituted for the benefit of the governed, this did not lead to the conclusion that all the people should be involved in the electoral process or that they all needed to be directly represented in the House of Commons. Consent could be implicit rather than explicit. By agreeing to remain under the protection of the laws of Britain, a British subject was implicitly consenting to those laws. Direct representation could legitimately be restricted to those who would use the vote responsibly, because what mattered most was not the number of voters but the quality of the chosen legislators. It was widely accepted, at least until the late eighteenth century, that those without leisure, education, and property could not be trusted with the

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constitutional task of choosing the people’s representatives, whose task it was to hold the executive to account, to redress grievances, and to vote taxes. The poor were uneducated and ill informed, were too ready to defer to their superiors, or were too easily influenced, even deluded, by ill-designing men. For some commentators, the voice of the people was a sound that should not be heard: “the voice of the people is the cry of hell as leading to idolatry, rebellion, murder, and all the wickedness the devil can suggest.”13 Near the end of the eighteenth century Burke was of the opinion that “A perfect democracy is . . . the most shameful thing in the world. As it is the most shameless, it is also the most fearless.”14 More sober commentators were equally opposed to a democratic franchise on the grounds that poor men must be considered to have no will of their own, because they were so dependent upon the will of their landlords, masters, or employers. In his famous Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone acknowledged that, in theory, all men had a claim on the franchise, but, in practice, he fully accepted that they could not be trusted to exercise this right. He feared that those without property could not be trusted to exercise the franchise responsibly and hence his readiness to deny them the vote: If those persons had votes, they would be tempted to dispose of them under some undue influence or other. This would give a great, an artful, or a wealthy man, a larger share in elections than is consistent with general liberty. If it were probable that every man would give his vote freely, and without influence of any kind, then, upon the true theory and genuine principles of liberty, every member of the community, however poor, should have a vote in electing those delegates, to whose charge is committed the disposal of his property, his liberty, and his life. But, since that can hardly be expected in persons of indigent fortunes, or those who are under the immediate dominion of others, all popular states have been obliged to establish certain qualifications; whereby some, who are suspected of having no will of their own, are excluded from voting, in order to set other individuals, whose wills may be supposed independent, more thoroughly upon a level with each other.15

There was undoubtedly a widespread fear that any electoral power placed in the hands of the uneducated poor would result in political anarchy, because the poor would be misled by dangerous demagogues or would be too ready to use violence to seize the hard-earned property of the wealthy. The poor were without the “discernment to perceive, or leisure to learn, or steadiness to pursue, the best, or indeed any effectual means of guarding against the power and artifices of the few.”16


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If such men were ever in a position to influence election results, all order would be subverted and anarchy would prevail. It was claimed that an absolute or perfect democracy could never produce stable government or the necessary security of property. A rash, inconsiderate, and greedy mob would vote for those who desired to resort to violence to seize the property of men of superior wealth, status, and talents. The franchise therefore needed to be restricted to men of independent means in order to ensure that the lower orders could not use the force of mere numbers to dictate who would represent the people in the House of Commons: Therefore, when we talk of people with regard to elections, we ought to think only of those of the better sort, without comprehending the mob or mere dregs of the people; for an election may be free and uncorrupted though these appear against it, but would be very far from being free, if the electors were intimidated and compelled to vote as directed by a tumultuous mob of low people.17

Most defenders of the British constitution maintained that the House of Commons represented property not persons. They believed that government was established primarily to protect property and they pointed out that it was property in its various forms that was taxed not the person. Property was regarded as the basis of wealth, status, and power, and hence a person’s political influence should be in proportion to the extent of his property. The monarch possessed most property and merited possession of greater power than any other individual merit. The aristocracy possessed so much property that they deserved being directly part of the legislature as members of the House of Lords. For their part, the members of the House of Commons represented the men of property below the level of the nobility. Property needed to be defended by being well represented, because it was vulnerable to the ambitions of men of ability who might dominate a democratic legislature.18 Stress was also laid on the representation of property because it was property that provided men with the ability to act as free and independent political agents. The poor were too ignorant of the affairs of the world, too preoccupied with laboring long hours merely to survive, and were too dependent on their landlords, masters, and employers to act as free, independent, and responsible political agents. Men of property, on the other hand, possessed the means to be independent and they had the leisure to improve their knowledge of the affairs of the world. Their activities contributed to the wealth and strength of the country, and they could

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be trusted to exercise the franchise with a due regard to their own interests and those of the nation at large. The possession of property attached a man to his country and gave him an interest that he would always strive to protect. The franchise therefore should never extend beyond the small proprietors to the ignorant and dependent poor: He who has a house, and family and goods; and in his trade at least, or other ostensible means of subsistence, a kind of independence, will be alarmed at every movement that may hurt or touch him, in any of these vulnerable parts. He will watch with an anxious eye even the remotest inroad of oppression.19

When discussing the qualities required of those who would serve as the representatives of the people in the House of Commons, even greater stress was placed on the possession of property, particularly of landed property. The propertied electors were constantly advised of the danger of electing men as their representatives who lacked the ability to deliberate on important matters of state and who lacked the wealth to resist being corrupted by the offer of royal office, places, or pensions.20 Given the threat that would be posed by a legislative assembly so composed, the British electorate was advised: The representation of a nation, ought to consist of the most wise, wealthy, sober, and courageous of the people, not men of mean spirits, and little figure, and sordid passions, that would sell the interests of the people that chose them to advance their own; or be at the beck of some great men, in the hopes of a lift to a good imploy. Those that have fair estates have, in a manner, given hostages to their country, and must be errant fools, before they can play the knave with you.21

Men of landed estates were regarded as possessing a fixed and permanent stake in society that would encourage them to act in order to defend that fixed interest. Landed men would not consent to have the laws subverted when they were the firmest security for their substantial possessions. Such men were likely to be educated, leisured, and well informed about local, national, and international affairs. Because they lived on their rents and not on their labor, they were free to employ all their time on the discharge of their public duties. Should they neglect these duties, they would suffer more than those they represented in parliament.22 It was also often claimed that men who had inherited or had purchased a substantial landed estate had given the voters a pledge that they would not flee the country in the event of a serious emergency,


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but would be prepared to brave any danger in order to protect their fixed possessions. It was this conviction—that ability, independence, and integrity were to be found chiefly in men of landed estates—that led to the passing of the Landed Qualification Act of 1711 that decreed that candidates to represent the people in the House of Commons must possess substantial landed property. Three-quarters of a century later, Lord North informed the House of Commons: He was ready to admit, the bulk and weight of that House of Commons ought always to be in the hands of the country gentlemen, who were undoubtedly the best and most respectable objectives of the confidence of the people. Their disinterestedness, their virtue, their public spirit, he admired: they were fitted by their education and their situation in life more peculiarly for members of parliament than almost any other description of men; besides, they had the greatest stake in the country after all and were the most deeply interested in its welfare: because, let what would happen men of business and manufacturers could go and get their living elsewhere; but a country gentleman could not quit his native country because he could not carry his estates away with him.23

Although most parliamentary constituencies were urban settlements rather than rural counties, this prejudice in favor of landed men acting as the representatives of the people ensured that most boroughs returned country gentlemen to parliament. There was considerable prejudice against financiers, merchants, and manufacturers sitting in the House of Commons because these owners of moveable property could more easily move abroad with their wealth in the event of a domestic crisis. Hence, only a minority of representatives were drawn from men possessing this kind of wealth. Such men were therefore urged to purchase landed estates as a pledge to the electors that they would not flee in an emergency. As Britain increasingly developed as a commercial and then as a manufacturing country during the eighteenth century, some voices were raised in favor of having in the House of Commons representatives who possessed property other than landed estates. Edmund Burke was the first to articulate the view that parliament should represent more than just landed men, more than even merchants and manufacturers. He advised that if men of other kinds of wealth and influence were not directly represented in the House of Commons, they would become dissatisfied with the present constitutional arrangements: A great official, a great professional, a great military and naval interest, all necessarily comprehending many people of the first weight, ability, wealth, and spirit, had been gradually formed in the kingdom. These

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H.T.Dickinson new interests must be let into the share of representation, else possibly they may be inclined to destroy those institutions of which they are not permitted to partake.24

Though a few men of great talent, such as Burke himself, who did not possess much property, could be brought into the House of Commons because of the electoral influence of great aristocratic patrons, the great majority of MPs were men of substantial property. They were, as we have seen, elected to parliament by a minority of adult males who also possessed property qualifications. This was far from being a democratic system of representation, but it did not prevent its defenders from maintaining that all the British people were represented in the House of Commons. The repeated claim was that all the British people were virtually represented, even if not directly so, in parliament. The propertied adult males who were qualified to vote in parliamentary elections were seen as representing not only their own interests, but also those of their wives, children, servants, tenants, and employees. The qualified electors cast their votes in all counties in the kingdom and in all types of urban settlements. Some large towns might not return MPs, but the propertied men in these towns might well be qualified to vote in the county election or in some other represented town where they possessed property. Even if they did not possess the right to vote anywhere else, the interests of such large commercial or manufacturing towns were represented in parliament by boroughs of a similar kind. Cities and boroughs such as London, Bristol, Liverpool, Newcastle, Norwich, and Nottingham, which did elect representatives to parliament, could protect the economic interests of towns such as Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield, which did not have the right to return MPs to the House of Commons. Moreover, the fact that a large town was not directly represented in parliament did not mean that it had no influence over the decisions taken in the House of Commons. No one could believe, claimed Lord North, that the interests of and the petitions from such large towns as Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester carried less weight with MPs deliberating in the House of Commons than those from such small boroughs as Old Sarum. This claim was not without considerable validity since many unrepresented towns were very active in support of pressure group campaigns that clearly brought the opinions and interests of the inhabitants of these towns to the attention of MPs who had not been elected directly to represent the interests of these men.25


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It was constantly repeated throughout the eighteenth century that every MP represented all the British people and not merely the particular constituency that he was elected to represent in parliament. Indeed, members of the House of Commons were seen as the representatives not only of those who voted for them, but also of those who had voted against them—and even of those who had no vote to give: “the members once chosen, . . . were, in effect, the representatives of the people at large, as well of those who did not vote at all, or who, having voted, gave their votes against them, as of those by whose suffrages they were actually seated in the House.”26 Once a man was elected as a member of parliament, he ceased to be the representative of the constituency that actually returned him and became, instead, a representative of the people at large. Moreover, every individual person in the country was represented not just by the Member of Parliament returned by the constituency in which he lived, but by the whole House of Commons.27 It therefore mattered little whether certain towns were represented or not, or whether particular individuals possessed the franchise or not. The House of Commons could legitimately claim to represent the interests of the whole kingdom and the entire population, provided MPs represented all the regions of the country, a wide variety of constituencies, and a sufficiently numerous and responsible body of electors. Members of Parliament might be chosen by adult men of property, but once elected they also represented all the women, children and poor men in the nation. Only by recognizing this concept of virtual representation could there be a political community, a shared interest, a sympathy of feeling, and an attitude of trust between the people at large and their representatives in parliament. While serving in the House of Commons, the people’s representatives could only pass laws and raise taxes that applied to them as much as to their constituents or to the people as a whole. These representatives did not have an interest quite distinct from the people at large: their interests were interwoven with those of quite humble voters and even more humble nonvoters. The House of Commons was a single, unified body in which all members represented the general, collective good of the people as a whole. Every member was entitled to vote on every issue brought before the chamber and not just on those issues affecting his own constituency. The House of Commons was described as a deliberative body in which all members were free to act to the best of their abilities and in accordance with their independent judgment. The electors had the right to choose their representatives in parliament and to oust them at a subsequent election, but they did not have the right to

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control their activities while they were serving the whole nation in the House of Commons. At the close of the poll in Bristol, on November 3, 1774, Edmund Burke declared to the assembled electors: Parliament is not a Congress of Ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as Agent and Advocate, against other Agents and Advocates; but parliament is a deliberative Assembly of one Nation, with one Interest, that of the whole where, not local Purposes, not local Prejudices ought to guide, but the general Good, resulting from the general Reason of the whole. You chuse a Member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a Member of Bristol, but he is a Member of Parliament.28

The independence of the House of Commons had priority over the wishes of the people because the liberties of the people depended upon the independence of their representatives. While the electors could offer advice to their representatives in parliament, they had no constitutional right to instruct them or to bind them to pursue particular courses of action. To attempt to do so would rob Members of Parliament of their personal independence and destroy their character as representatives of the whole nation. It would in fact prevent them serving the whole community.29 As Jeremiah Dyson MP declared: “I conceive there is, and ever has been the most essential difference between deputies appointed to act according to the orders of those who send them, and representatives of the people who are chosen to act and judge for them.”30 When critics of the prevailing electoral system condemned it as unequal, unfair, and irrational, its defenders could point out how well it worked in practice. If the composition of the House of Commons was carefully scrutinized, it could be clearly demonstrated that the irregular electoral system produced excellent results. Among members of parliament could be found men of great wealth, high status, and eminent abilities. These men were best qualified to make laws, levy taxes, and promote the public welfare. Since the best men could be clearly shown as having been chosen to serve in parliament, it mattered little how they were actually elected to represent the people. A close scrutiny of the people’s representatives, so it was argued, would reveal that many of those representing the large counties and the most populous boroughs rarely distinguished themselves in the legislature, whereas the chief men of business and the finest orators were often chosen by the smallest boroughs.31 The defenders of Britain’s aristocratic constitution of the eighteenth century were convinced that any move toward a more democratic system of representation would destroy the nation’s mixed government and balanced constitution. Robert Walpole,


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Britain’s first prime minister, advised the House of Commons: “in all the regulations we make, with respect to our constitution, we are to guard against running too much into that form of government which is properly called democratical.”32 A pro-government newspaper of the same period declared to the wider nation: The people have no authority against or over the Legislature; for, while the constitution is preserved, the original power of the people in their collective body is lost and swallow’d up entirely in their representatives, whom they chuse to judge and act for them. And to say, that the people have a right to impose their opinions upon the Parliament, is to change the very nature of the government, by turning it into a democracy or popular state.33

Obviously, there was no desire to turn Britain into a democratic state in the earlier eighteenth century. On the contrary, there was a strong and persistent effort to enshrine the combined legislature of King, Lords, and Commons as the sovereign authority in the state.34 In the 1760s, the eminent constitutional lawyer, William Blackstone, explicitly rejected John Locke’s famous claim, expressed in his Second Treatise on Government, that the sovereign authority in the state rested in the people even after the creation of civil government. Blackstone maintained that there must be a supreme, absolute, uncontrolled, and irresistible authority in every orderly state and he insisted that according to the British constitution sovereign authority in Britain was lodged in the combined legislature of King, Lords, and Commons. Their joint actions no power on earth could undo except a subsequent parliament. He concluded: “So long therefore as the English constitution lasts, we may venture to affirm, that the power of parliament is absolute and without control.”35 In the following decades, this view came to be challenged by those who argued that the sovereign authority in the British state lay with the British people. Such a radical view found little support from within parliament or from among the propertied elite. Edmund Burke expressed their opposition to such a radical claim when he told the House of Commons: The sovereignty of the people was the most false, wicked, and mischievous doctrine that ever could be preached to them. . . . If the majority of the public was to be taken not by weight, but by tale, the most ignorant would elect, and none but the crafty and wicked would be elected. . . . The moment that equality and the sovereignty of the people was adopted as the rule of government, property would be at an end, and religion, morality, and law, which grew out of property, would fall with it.36

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Challenging the System of Representation The early part of eighteenth century witnessed a growing trend toward an aristocratic interpretation of Britain’s unwritten constitution and the firm entrenchment of the notion that sovereignty lay with the combined legislature of King, Lords, and Commons.37 John Locke’s radical political theory, set out in his Second Treatise (1690), had stressed that sovereignty lay with the people, but even he had assumed that the authority of the people would lie dormant so long as the legislature was not overthrown by force for abusing its powers. Though his radical theories made limited headway in the early part of the century, by the 1770s a small number of British radicals, undoubtedly influenced by the American Revolution, were beginning to reassert the view that sovereignty lay with the people. Richard Price, a staunch critic of the government’s American policies, declared: Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the doctrine which some have taught, with respect to the omnipotence of parliament. They [MPs] possess no power beyond the limits of the trust for the execution of which they were formed. If they contradict this trust, they betray their constituents, and dissolve themselves. All delegated power must be subordinated and limited. If omnipotence can, with any sense, be ascribed to a legislature, it must be lodged where all legislative authority originates: that is, in the PEOPLE. For their sakes government is instituted; and their’s is the only real omnipotence.38

By the 1790s the more advanced British radicals were insisting that the sovereign will of the people should be actively and continuously expressed in the making of the constitution, in its operation, and in any amendments made to it.39 To achieve an effective and continuous supervision over the actions not only of the executive but also of the legislature, the people as a whole needed to possess extensive political rights and full control over their representatives in parliament. Radical demands for political reforms that would democratize the system of representation were not advanced before the 1760s. However, there had been campaigns earlier to reduce the ability of the crown and the aristocracy to influence the composition of the House of Commons. Many critics of the executive insisted that royal and aristocratic patronage was threatening to undermine the independence of the House of Commons and to subvert the liberties of the people because of the influence exerted on both the voters and their representatives. To weaken this influence, campaigns were waged to


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reduce the number of royal officials, placemen, and pensioners sitting in parliament, to increase the frequency of general elections, and to end electoral abuses.40 William Pulteney, the leading opponent of Sir Robert Walpole in the House of Commons, warned members: It is certain, that the liberties of this country depend upon the freedom of our elections for members of parliament; . . . if the executive have such an influence over most of the electors in the kingdom, as to get any person chosen they please to recommend, they will then always have a majority of their own creatures in every House of Commons, and from such representatives what can the people expect? 41

Electors were frequently urged by government critics to choose representatives who would retain their independence from the executive to ensure that their representatives would serve the true and best interests of the nation. Some political commentators went further to claim that it was reasonable, legitimate, and constitutional for the voters to instruct their representatives on how to conduct themselves with regard to certain issues brought before the House of Commons.42 By late eighteenth century some radicals even sought to extort pledges from candidates at the hustings. In 1774, for example, the candidates for election for the city of London were asked to pledge themselves in the following terms: We do also solemnly promise never to accept from the crown or its Ministers, place, pension, contract, title, gratuity or emolument of any kind whatsoever; and we do further promise to follow on all occasions such instructions as our constituents, in Common Hall assembled, shall think proper to give us.43

In the Bristol election of the same year Edmund Burke’s fellow member, Henry Crugar, took a very different line from that adopted by his more famous colleague. Unlike Burke, he accepted that his Bristol constituents did have the right to instruct him about how to vote in the House of Commons: It has ever been my opinion that the electors have a right to instruct their members. For my part, I shall always think it my duty in Parliament to be guided by your counsels and instructions. I shall consider myself the servant of my constituents, not their master, subservient to their will, not superior to it.44

Long before this, critics of the executive began to make demands for free, fair, and frequent elections. From the 1730s onwards, there

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were proposals to eliminate electoral corruption by transferring parliamentary seats from the small “rotten” boroughs to the larger counties and the growing towns. There were demands for more parliamentary seats for London, Westminster as well as Middlesex, and for the representation of such growing towns as Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds.45 By increasing the number of constituencies with large numbers of voters, it was expected that royal and aristocratic influence would wane. This would have the effect of rendering the House of Commons more independent of the executive and hence more able to represent the interests of the people. Reforms such as these, however, would not necessarily democratize the electoral system since only a minority of adult males would still be entrusted with the franchise. It was only from the 1760s onwards when campaigns were launched to widen the franchise that a genuine effort was made to make the House of Commons more representative of the people at large. A growing number of scholars have recently suggested that in his Second Treatise John Locke justified the positive political rights of all men, but he did not make any explicit statement about giving the franchise to all adult males. In stressing the natural equality of all men and in demonstrating that every man had property in his life, liberty, person, actions and possessions, Locke is seen as implicitly acknowledging the right of all men to possess the vote.46 The only adult males he would have excluded from the franchise were slaves and lunatics.47 Other scholars, while recognizing the implicit radicalism of Locke’s Second Treatise, have concluded that he was probably content to restrict the franchise to independent men of property.48 They have pointed out that many radical contemporaries of Locke—including Algernon Sydney, James Tyrrell, John Toland and John Trenchard—were quite prepared to restrict the franchise to freeholders in the counties and to merchants, shopkeepers, and master craftsmen in the boroughs.49 One radical Whig, while accepting Locke’s contract theory, stressed that all civil governments were erected by men of property: “It is owned, that all governments are made by man, and ought to be made by those who are owners of the territory over which the government extends.”50 In defending the rights of free men, John Toland, another radical Whig contemporary of Locke, insisted: “By Freemen I understand men of property, or persons that are able to live of themselves; and those who cannot subsist in this independence, I call Servants.”51 In the early eighteenth century, therefore, both radical and conservative political commentators appear to have agreed that the franchise should remain only in the hands of men of property. There were no


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proposals to extend the franchise until the 1760s and 1770s when the American Revolution renewed interest in John Locke’s radical political ideas about natural rights and popular sovereignty. The American colonists reminded Britons too of their constitutional rights and of the link between taxation and representation.52 Many voices in Britain began to be raised in favor of political reform and there was considerable discussion about who should possess the franchise. Not all those who advocated political reforms at this time were convinced, however, that the vote should be conceded to all adult males. Obadiah Hulme and James Burgh, both influential radicals, advised extending the franchise only to those householders who paid local rates and other specified taxes.53 Richard Price, noted for his support of the American and French Revolutions, wished to extend the franchise, but he did not conclude that all men had a right to vote in parliamentary elections. He was conscious that many men were too poor, too ignorant, and too dependent to be trusted with the franchise. He believed that the vote ought to be exercised responsibly and he was convinced that this therefore required the electors to have a level of education and a measure of economic security in order to be independent of those who might seek to persuade or bribe them to cast their vote in their favor.54 Joseph Priestley argued that the right to vote should be annexed to educational qualifications of some kind. He proposed a literacy test that would have to be passed before any man could claim the right to vote.55 William Belsham was ready to disqualify from the franchise any man of extreme ignorance, gross venality, or abject dependence.56 There were, however, other radicals in Britain who were prepared to argue that all men, irrespective of their social status, economic position, or educational attainments, ought to be granted the right to vote in parliamentary elections. According to John Cartwright, the franchise ought to be attached to the person and not to the property of a man. Poverty was no justification for stripping a man of his natural right to elect those who would represent his interests in the House of Commons. Indeed, labor itself was a species of property and, since all men paid taxes at least indirectly on many of their purchases, they fully deserved to be represented in parliament. Cartwright thus came to the conclusion: The first and most natural idea which will occur to any unprejudiced man, is that every individual [one] of them, whether possessed of what is vulgarly called property, or not, ought to have a vote in sending to parliament those men who are to act as his representatives; and who, in an especial manner, are to be the guardians of public freedom; in which, the poor, surely, as well as the rich have an interest. . . . All are by

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H.T.Dickinson nature free; all are by nature equal: freedom implies choice; equality excludes degrees in freedom. All the Commons, therefore, have an equal right to vote in the election of those who are to be the guardians of their lives and liberties.57

Other radicals reached the same conclusion. They argued that men voluntarily agreed to the creation of civil society and civil government in order to better safeguard their natural rights. Even after agreeing to submit themselves to the authority of a legislature, all men retained their right to elect and to hold to account those who acted as their representatives. If any man was denied the right to vote for a Member of Parliament, then he was little more than a slave: “He is compelled to obey laws, made without his consent, given either personally, or by his representative: he, therefore, wears the distinguishing, humiliating badge of a bondman.”58 In Thomas Paine’s opinion, all men must possess the franchise if they are to protect their natural right to preserve their life, liberty, and property: The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right, is to reduce man to a state of slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.59

Universal manhood suffrage was supported by many other radical propagandists, including John Jebb, David Williams, Daniel Isaac Eaton, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and it was one of the principal demands for reform put forward by the radical clubs and associations of the 1780s and 1790s. None the less, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that only a minority of late eighteenth-century reformers in Britain could be classed as full and unequivocal democrats.60 Joseph Priestley believed that the progressive middling orders of society were the proper representatives of the people and the natural rulers of the country.61 Richard Price did not expect political power to be exercised solely by that part of the legislature elected by the people.62 James Burgh expected MPs to be men of ability, education, and character drawn from the prosperous landed, commercial, and professional classes.63 James Mackintosh expected the multitude to “value the superiority of enlightened men” and to “retain a sufficient consciousness of ignorance to preclude rebellion against their dictates.”64 Even John Cartwright, a supporter of universal manhood suffrage, expected the voters to elect men of birth and high status to the House of Commons and he referred to MPs as an “elective aristocracy.”65 John Thelwall never expected the


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poor to become sufficiently qualified to enter parliament or to hold political office.66 Indeed, at times, he feared that democracy might actually obstruct the progress of society.67 The democratic leanings of nearly all the radical reformers stopped short of advocating the positive political rights of women. Adult females were regarded as mere appendages of men and as existing on the same level as children or domestic servants. They were seen as entirely dependent on their male relatives and hence they were incapable of exercising the rights of an active, independent citizen. John Cartwright argued that women had no right to be represented in parliament: Women being by nature unable to qualify for and to perform various labours of magistracy and office in civil government, and of serving as the military defenders of their country, which are equally duties appertaining to dominion, and necessary to the preservation of political liberty, their right to the latter falls to the ground.68

John Longley claimed that nature fitted only men for public activity, whereas women were best fitted for domestic occupations.69 Even Mary Wollstonecraft, who was devoted to improving the social status and economic condition of women, accepted that, so long as women remained in a position of subordination and dependence, they would remain unfit to play a full, active, and equal role in public life. Women, in her view, certainly had the potential for full rationality and equal moral responsibility, but, until their social and economic inferiority was redressed, they could not expect to possess the same active political rights as men. She therefore refrained from campaigning for votes for women, though she did hint that she might do so at some future date: “for I really think that women ought to have representatives instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.”70 Thomas Spence went further. At first he made a distinction between fully active citizens (men) and proprietary citizens with rights to an equal share in the revenues raised on the rent of land held in common (women and children). Later he conceded that women should be given the vote, but not an active role in public life because of the delicacy of their sex.71 A few other radicals were prepared to give the vote to women, including George Phillips and Thomas Cooper, while an anonymous contributor to The Cabinet, published in Norwich, argued unequivocally in favor of adult female suffrage and even for the right of women to sit in parliament and to hold important political offices. Yet

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even this radical commentator recognized that most men would laugh his arguments out of court.72 Most British radicals were also content to limit their political demands to a reform of the electoral system by which the people chose their representatives in the House of Commons. They had no wish to abolish monarchy, aristocracy, or the hereditary right to rule. James Burgh, Richard Price, and John Cartwright, for example, all explicitly denied that they wished to undermine monarchical government or planned to abolish aristocratic privileges.73 Richard Price insisted: I know not one individual among them [the reformers], who would not tremble at the thought of changing into a Democracy, our mixed form of government, or who has any other wish with regard to it [the constitution], than to restore it to purity and vigour, by removing the defects in our representation, and establishing that independence of the three states on one another, in which its essence consists.74

By the 1790s, however, a few radical theorists were prepared to launch a forthright attack on aristocratic privileges and hereditary government. Titles, honours, and special privileges could not be tolerated, so it was argued, in a society that desired to treat all men as political equals. Neither the monarchy nor the House of Lords could be defended on any rational principle and so they must be cast aside while on the march of progress. John Oswald bitterly attacked all hereditary distinctions.75 Other radicals endorsed his view, but it was Thomas Paine, fresh from his service on behalf of the American Republic, who revealed himself to be the most determined advocate of a democratic republic. In his view, there could be no justice in a political system that created hereditary legislators out of a tiny minority of the population. A free people would never willingly set up a monarchy or approve of a hereditary aristocracy. These institutions could have been established only by force or fraud. In his view, the then unreformed British constitution was therefore corrupt, expensive and unjust; it failed utterly to represent the interests of the people as a whole, and it ought to be abolished.76

Notes 1. H.T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in EighteenthCentury Britain (New York, 1977); H.T. Dickinson “The EighteenthCentury Debate on the Sovereignty of Parliament,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 26 (1976), pp. 189–210;


2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

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H.T. Dickinson, “The British Constitution,” in A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. H.T. Dickinson (Oxford, 2002), pp. 3–18; H.T. Dickinson, “The Ideological Debate on the British Constitution in the Eighteenth and Early nineteenth Centuries,” in Il Modello Costituzionale Inglese e la sua recezione nell’area Mediterranea tra la fine del 700 e la prime meta dell’800, ed. Andrea Romano (Milan, 1998), pp. 145–92. H.T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 13–55: Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 178–80. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, pp. 201–16; and John A. Phillips, Electoral Behavior in Unreformed England: Plumpers, Splitters and Straights (Princeton, 1982), pp. 176–93. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, p. 64. P.T. Underdown, “Bristol and Burke,” in Bristol in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Patrick McGrath (Newton Abbot, 1972), pp. 41–62; P.T. Underdown, “Edmund Burke, the Commissary of his Bristol Constituents, 1774–1780,” English Historical Review 73 (1958), pp. 252–69; Lucy S. Sutherland, “Edmund Burke and the Relations between Members of Parliament and their Constituents,” Studies in Burke and His Time 10 (1968), pp. 1005–21; O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, pp. 49–50, 53, 272; Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 162–3; and The House of Commons 1754–1790, L.B. Namier and John Brooke, eds., 3 vols. (London, 1964), I, pp. 79, 207, 213, 355. Helen E. Witmar, The Property Qualification of Members of Parliament (New York, 1943). J.G.A. Pocock, “The Classical Theory of Deference,” American Historical Review 81 (1976), pp. 516–23; O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, pp. 50–55; Frank O’Gorman, “Electoral Deference in Unreformed England, 1760–1832,” Journal of Modern History 56 (1984), pp. 394–99; Frank O’Gorman, “The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England,” Social History 11 (1986), pp. 47–48; and Paul Langford, “Property and ‘Virtual Representation’ in EighteenthCentury England,” Historical Journal 31 (1988): 90–3. The House of Commons 1715–1754, ed. Romney Sedgwick, 2 vols. (London, 1970), I, p. 340; and Dickinson, Politics of the People, pp. 47–9. House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols., ed. Sheila Lambert (Wilmington, DE, 1975–76); and Frederick H. Spencer, Municipal Origins: An Account of English Private Bill Legislation relating to Local Government, 1740–1835 (London, 1911), pp. 38–41, 65–9. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, pp. 259–85, 290, 330–31, 355; Nicholas Rogers, “Resistance to Oligarchy: the City Opposition

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

to Walpole and his Successors. 1725–47,” in London in the Age of Reform, ed. John Stevenson (Oxford, 1977), p. 13; Nicholas Rogers, “Aristocratic Clientage, Trade and Independency: Popular Politics in Pre-Radical Westminster,” Past and Present 63 (1973), pp. 75, 94–96; Linda Colley, “Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism before Wilkes,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 31 (1981), pp. 7–9; and H.T. Dickinson, “ Radicals and Reformers in the Age of Wilkes and Wyvill,” in British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt 1742–1789, ed. Jeremy Black (London, 1990), pp. 139–40. John Phillip Reid, The Concept of Representation in the Age of the American Revolution (Chicago, 1989), p. 11. Ibid., p. 12. Francis Atterbury, The Voice of the People, No Voice of God (London, 1710), p. 6. The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke: Vol. VIII: The French Revolution 1790–1794, ed. L.G. Mitchell (Oxford, 1989), p. 144. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols., 7th ed. (Oxford, 1775), 1, p. 171. Three Letters to Dr Price (London, 1776), p. 84. Henry Fox in the House of Commons, March 9, 1742 in Parliamentary History of England, XII, ed. William Cobbett (London, 1812), pp. 463–64. The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke: Vol. VIII, ed. L.G. Mitchell, p. 102. Robert Nares, Principles of Government, Deduced from Reason, Supported by English Experience, and Opposed to French Errors (London, 1792), pp. 51–52. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh, 1966), pp. 186–87. Henry Cave, English Liberties: Or, the Free Born Subject’s Inheritance (London, 1700), p. 76. Matthew Wheelock, Reflections Moral and Political in Great Britain and Her Colonies (London, 1770), p. 12. Lord North in the House of Commons, April 18, 1785 in Parliamentary History of England, XXV, ed. William Cobbett (London, 1815), p. 461. Edmund Burke, “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents” (1770), in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. II: Party, Parliament and the American Crisis 1766–1774, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford, 1981), p. 310. Lord North in the House of Commons, June 16, 1784 in Parliamentary History of England, XXIV, ed. Cobbett (London, 1815), p. 988. William Pitt in the House of Commons, May 7, 1783 in Parliamentary History of England, XXIII, ed. Cobbett (London, 1815), p. 831.


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27. John Young, Essays, 2nd ed. (Glasgow, 1794), p. 78. See also H.T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, pp. 281–84. 28. Burke, “Speech at the Conclusion of the Poll, 3 November 1774,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Volume III: Party, Parliament, and the American War 1774–80, ed. W.M. Elofson and John A. Woods (Oxford, 1996), p. 69. Burke’s italics. 29. Lucy S. Sutherland, “Edmund Burke and the Relations between Members of Parliament and Their Constituents,” Studies in Burke and His Time 10 (1968), pp. 1005–21. 30. Jeremiah Dyson in the House of Commons, March 1769 in Sir Henry Cavendish’s Debates of the House of Commons, ed. J. Wright (London, 1841), I, p. 280. 31. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, pp. 283–84. 32. Sir Robert Walpole in the House of Commons, February 1734 in Parliamentary History of England, IX, ed. Cobbett (London, 1811), p. 473. 33. London Journal, May 5, 1733. 34. Dickinson, “The Eighteenth-Century Debate on the Sovereignty of Parliament,” passim. 35. Blackstone, Commentaries, I, p. 162. 36. Burke in the House of Commons, February 1793 in Parliamentary History of England, XXX, ed. Cobbett (London, 1815), pp. 554–55. 37. See note 32. 38. Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty 7th ed. (London, 1776), pp. 15–16. See also [Obadiah Hulme,] An Historical Essay on the English Constitution (London, 1771), pp. 4–7; Resistance No Rebellion (London, 1775), pp. 12–13. 39. Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (London, 1790), pp. 26–35; Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (London, 1791–92), ed. Henry Collins (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 111, 142, 146, 150–52, 165–66, 213; and The Birthright of Britons (London, 1792), pp. 120–23. 40. G.S. Holmes, “The Attack on ‘he Influence of the Crown’ 1702–1716,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 39 (1966): 47–68; John Toland, The Danger of Mercenary Parliaments (London, 1698), p. 7; and [Daniel Defoe,] The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England, Examined and Asserted (London, 1702), p. 14. 41. William Pulteney in the House of Commons, March 14, 1733 in Parliamentary History of England, VIII, ed. Cobbett (London, 1811), p. 1325. 42. Instructions sent to MPs in 1742 in History of England XII (London, 1812), pp. 416–27; Paul Langford, The Excise Crisis: Society and Politics in the Age of Walpole (Oxford, 1975), pp. 47–57; The Electors Right Asserted (London, 1701), pp. 1–24; A Hint upon Instructions from the Electors to their Representatives in Parliament (London, 1742); A Letter to the People of Great Britain, on the Present Alarming Crisis

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43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

(London, 1771), p. 45; John Towers, A Letter to Dr Samuel Johnson (London, 1775), pp. 22–23; The Works of John Jebb, ed. John Disney 3 vols. (London, 1787), II, pp. 460–61, 463. The London Chronicle, October 1–4, 1774. Bristol Journal, November 5, 1774. [Daniel Defoe,] The Freeholders Plea against Stockjobbing elections on Parliament Men (London, 1701), pp. 16–18; [John Toland,] The Art of Governing by Partys (London, 1701), pp. 75–76; The Representation of London and Westminster in Parliament, Examined and Consider’d (London, 1702), pp. 27–28; Common Sense, April 15, 1738, October 6, 1739, January 10, 1741; and Westminster Journal, July 4, 11, and 25, 1747. James Tully, A Discourse on Property (Cambridge, 1980), p. 173; Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, 1986), chap. 11; Richard Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (London, 1987), chaps. 4–5; Ruth W. Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism (Chicago, 1987), passim; Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke and Equality (Cambridge, 2002), passim; and A. John Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton, 1992), passim. Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism, chaps. 5–7; Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 578–84; Judith Richards, Lotte Mulligan, and J. Graham, “ ‘Property’ and ‘People’: Political Usages of Locke and Some Contemporaries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (1981): 29–51; Richard Ashcraft, “Revolution Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government: Radicalism and Lockean Political Theory,” Political Theory 8 (1980): 429–86; Richard Ashcraft, “The Radical Dimension of Locke’s Political Thought: A Dialogic Essay on Some Problems of Interpretation,” History of Political Thought 13 (1992): 703–72; Richard Ashcraft, “Simple Objections and Complex Reality: Theorizing Political Radicalism in Seventeenth-Century England,” Political Studies 40 (1992), pp. 99–115. Gordon Schochet, “Radical Politics and Ashcraft’s Treatise on Locke,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 491–510; Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Locke against Democracy: Consent, Representation and Suffrage in the Two Treatise,” History of Political Thought 13 (1992), pp. 657–89; and David Wootton, “John Locke and Richard Ashcraft’s Revolutionary Politics,” Political Studies 40 (1992), pp. 79–98. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, pp. 88–90; and Julia Rudolph, Revolution by Degrees: James Tyrrell and Whig Political Thought in the Late Seventeenth Century (Basingstoke, 2002), passim. The Claims of the People of England, Essayed (London, 1701), p. 106. John Toland, The Militia Reform’d (London, 1698), pp. 18–19. Toland’s italics. John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III Cambridge, 1976), pp. 201–16.


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53. [Obadiah Hulme], An Historical Essay on the English Constitution, pp. 76, 153–54; and James Burgh, Political Disquisitions 3 vols. (London, 1774), I, pp. 26–28, 36–38, 51–54, 87–94, 106–27. 54. Dickinson, “Richard Price on Reason and Revolution,” in Religious Identities in Britain, 1660–1832, ed. William Gibson and Robert G. Ingram (Aldershot, UK, 2005), pp. 231–54. 55. Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History and General Policy 3rd ed. (Philadelphia, 1803), pp. 116–8; and Margaret Canovan, “Paternalistic Liberalism: Joseph Priestley on Rank and Inequality,” Enlightenment and Dissent 2 (1983), pp. 23–37. 56. William Belsham, Remarks on the Nation and the Necessity of a Parliamentary Reform (London, 1793), pp. 27–38. 57. John Cartwright, Take Your Choice! (London, 1776), pp. 19, 21–22. 58. Francis Stone, An Examination of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1792), p. 44. 59. Thomas Paine, “Dissertation on the First Principles of Government” (1795), in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 2 vols., ed. Philip S. Foner (New York, 1945), 2, p. 579. 60. Isaac Kramnick, “ Republican Revisionism Revisited,” American Historical Review 87 (1982), pp. 629–44. 61. Margaret Canvas, “Paternalistic Liberalism: Joseph Priestley on Rank and Inequality,” Enlightenment and Dissent 2 (1983), pp. 23–37. 62. D.O. Thomas, “Neither Republican Nor Democrat,” The Price-Priestley Newsletter 1 (1977), pp. 49–60. 63. James Burgh, Political Disquisitions, II, p. 62. 64. James Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae (London, 1791), pp. 365–6. 65. John Cartwright, The Commonwealth in Danger (London, 1795), p. 163. 66. John Thelwall, The Natural and Constitutional Rights of Britons to Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage and the Freedom of Popular Association (London, 1795), pp. 46–48. 67. National Archives (London), Treasury Solicitor’s Papers, TS.11957/3502(1). Thelwall’s “Lecture Notes.” 68. John Cartwright, An Appeal, Civil and Military, on the Subject of the English Constitution (London, 1799), p. 17. 69. John Longley, An Essay towards Forming a More Complete Representation of the Commons of Great Britain (London, 1795), pp. 4, 6. 70. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth, UK 1985), p. 260. 71. The Political Works of Thomas Spence, ed. H.T. Dickinson (Newcastleupon-Tyne, 1982), pp. xiv–xv, 62–63, 107. 72. George Phillips, The Necessity of a Speedy and Effectual Reform of Parliament (Manchester, 1792), p. 12n; H.M. Ellis, “Thomas Cooper—A Survey of His Life: Part 1—England, 1759–1794,” South

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73.

74. 75. 76.

Atlantic Quarterly 19 (1927), p. 38; and The Cabinet 3 vols. (Norwich, 1795), 1, pp. 178–84 and II, pp. 42–48. Burgh, Political Disquisitions, I, pp. 9, 11, 18; regarding Price, see Thomas, “Neither Republican Nor Democrat,” pp. 49–60; and John Cartwright, The Commonwealth in Danger (London, 1795), pp. xxxv, ci–cii. Richard Price: Political Writings, ed. D.O. Thomas (Cambridge, 1991), p. 165n19. John Oswald, Review of the Constitution of Great Britain, 3rd ed. (London, 1793), p. 12. Paine, Rights of Man, ed. Collins, pp. 102–6, 144–45, 148, 152–53, 162–66, 186–87, 200, 206, 209, 220–24.

Select Bibliography This subject was much debated in the pamphlet literature of the eighteenth century as indicated in the notes. The best modern studies of elections are Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989) and John A. Phillips, Electoral Behavior in Unreformed England: Plumpers, Splitters and Straights (Princeton, 1982). The most useful modern studies of the ideological debate on representation can be found in H.T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977); H.T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 1995); John Phillip Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 4 vols. (Madison, WI, 1986–93); and John Phillip Reid, The Concept of Representation in the Age of the American Revolution (Chicago, 1989). Despite their titles, Reid’s books include a wealth of valuable evidence, based on the contemporary pamphlet literature, on British ideological debates throughout the eighteenth century.

Chapter 2

Parliament and the Idea of Political Accountability in E arly Modern B ritain Paul Seaward

T

he idea of accountability—by which I mean here the process of auditing performance, identifying and addressing failures and weaknesses and attributing fault—is central to the way modern government operates and is conceived. Accountability helps to ensure the proper performance of a public trust, is supposed to promote efficiency and effectiveness in public organizations, and makes the organs of government respond to the appropriate authority. It contributes to the maintenance of political legitimacy by providing an assurance that the state is operated for the benefit of all its citizens, not of particular private interests. It is urged on less developed countries as a mechanism to overcome the corruption and inefficiency seen as endemic to fast-changing polities. Accountability largely takes place through, or under the supervision of, representative bodies that link the bureaucratic processes of checking and auditing to the political ones of attributing fault and meting out the consequences. Modern ideas of political accountability relate to democratic governments. They are also associated with states that have large responsibilities for the provision of services to the public. How meaningful is it to talk about the practice of accountability before the rise of the democratic and interventionist states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Certainly, the word accountability was

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rarely used in a political context before the late eighteenth century; “accountable” was, albeit infrequently.1 A complex web of accountability did exist within the small sphere of seventeenth century public administration, but the modern practice of bringing ideas of financial accountability and audit together with ideas about political control and responsiveness did not. When and where did that originate? Much work has recently been done on the processes of state formation and state building in Britain during the seventeenth century, the phenomenal development of the state in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the rapid growth of a fiscal-military state under the pressure of military competition from the Netherlands and France. The connection between these processes and new developments in the London capital markets has been well explored. That there was a relationship between British military success and fiscal exceptionalism and the comparative success and security of representative government in Britain has been widely assumed. In his influential work on the development of the fiscalmilitary state, John Brewer put parliament well within his narrative, describing the way a generation of “country” politicians in the last decade of the seventeenth and the first decade of the eighteenth vigorously used the House of Commons and the statutory Commissions of Accounts to exact detailed scrutiny of the government’s financial demands and to set serious limits on its spending power. Others have similarly emphasized the significance of parliamentary scrutiny in ensuring general consent to the high levels of taxation in eighteenth century Britain.2 Yet the nature and development of a system of parliamentary scrutiny and parliamentary accountability in the English and then British state has not been explored in detail. No doubt this is in part a reaction to the old Whig narrative and understanding of the place of parliament in predemocratic politics, in which an aggressive parliament vigorously defended its privileges against the Crown. That narrative of a series of confrontations, continuing throughout the eighteenth century until they die away into the ritualized confrontations of government and opposition politics was well established by the middle of the eighteenth century. But the routine and regular relationship between the processes of public administration and the processes of politics, the theory and practice of accountability for the ordinary operation of government, rather than for the policies of executive government as a whole, remains deeply obscure beyond a few classic works covering the history of the Treasury and the establishment of its control over public expenditure in the eighteenth century.

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Processes of accountability in pre–Civil War England The systems of accountability for the national and local agents of royal government were, by the seventeenth century, well established and well understood. Most of the gentry who participated in parliament would have been very familiar with the routine processes of financial accountability to the Crown. As collectors of national taxes such as the tenths and fifteenths or subsidies, as sheriffs, or as royal officials of one sort or another, many of them would have cleared their accounts through the Exchequer. Often, they were obliged to enter into a bond for payment when they were appointed; as they were therefore regarded as owing a personal debt to the Crown, the machinery of accounting through the Exchequer was a subject of no or little interest and concern.3 The processes of local accountability via quarter sessions and assizes were even more familiar. Central to them was the role of the Grand Jury (often referred to as the Grand Inquest) in each county, a body of gentlemen empanelled by the sheriff to present criminals for trial, but also to present complaints of failures in local administration by local officials, such as constables or coroners, or matters requiring amendment—for example failures to enforce legislation, or public buildings requiring repair.4 This was still, in some sense, accountability to the Crown, as it was royal justice that was being dispensed; but it was also a form of popular accountability, of obtaining redress for the complaints of local communities. Parliament’s role in securing popular redress was often seen by analogy with the activities of Grand Juries. The jurist Sir Edward Coke called the Commons the “generall Inquisitors of the Realm”;5 Sir Robert Filmer’s Freeholders’ Grand Inquest was clearly intended to evoke the connection; and it was often alluded to: “We are the Grand Jury of the Nation, as the Freeholders are of a county,” one Member stated in 1675.6 As with the Grand Jury, the Commons was a forum for bringing matters to the attention of the King. “The redress of the mischiefs and grievances that daily happen” was seen as central to their function, one of their principal ends. By the early seventeenth century, however, it was a function which Coke, at least, regarded as taking place principally through a committee structure, the committees appointed at the beginning of each parliament on grievances, courts of justice, privilege, and on trade. Parliamentarians regularly claimed, and just as regularly failed to insist that their grievances should be addressed before supply was given. The mechanisms through which

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they sought redress varied from the enactment of a bill—normally used to amend general or systematic problems—to addresses to the King requesting the correction of specific grievances, such as (in 1625) the grants of patents of monopoly—to, increasingly from the 1620s, the institution of legal proceedings in the House of Lords against named royal ministers through impeachment. These were structures of accountability developed in the middle ages. They were appropriate to small governments in which the sphere of executive action was limited and closely related to the personal nature of kingship, and in which local government was largely autonomous, and most often carried out by unpaid local gentry. The systems of financial and political accountability were clearly separate. Political accountability, an occasional process, not a constant one, focused around events such as quarter sessions, assizes, or meetings of parliament. It was not a process that implied control over officials, although it did imply a right to receive justice: it resulted in what were basically requests or demands for others to take action or to agree to action. It was not, formally at least, concerned with the way in which the Crown spent its money, although it was concerned with the quality of administration. The essentially limited nature of parliament’s remedial role was often emphasized: “Parliaments were the physic of the nation, not the food,” secretary of state Sir William Morrice told the Commons during the debate on the Triennial Act in 1664, although the phrase was virtually proverbial.7 By contrast, the process of financial accountability through the Exchequer was routine and constant, aimed at stopping fraud and ensuring the collection of money. Its purpose was not to examine systems as a whole, to improve efficiency, or to question the assumptions on which the expenditure was based. It was part of the machinery of royal government, not a public and open process. Control of the financial and accounting systems of the Exchequer was of course central to the control of government: were these to be removed from the Crown, it would be difficult to claim that government was any longer clearly monarchical. Yet the money given to the Crown by parliament always raised some complex and awkward questions about the relationship between financial accountability and political control. The growth of the indebtedness of the Crown and the increasing cost of military operations in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries left it less able to operate within its traditional and hereditary revenues and more and more reliant on appeals to parliament for the grant of “extraordinary” taxes. The natural (and often reasonable) response was to doubt the efficiency and honesty of the management of the


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hereditary and regular revenues of the Crown. In the parliaments of James I and Charles I such concerns were frequently expressed. Sir Thomas Wentworth in 1610 demanded an inquiry into royal revenues and expenses;8 in 1625 Sir Edward Coke referred to the “leaks” of cash from the Customs through fraud; Sir Robert Phelips called for the Commons to “look into the estate and government.”9 The Crown was prepared, despite reservations, to respond to such doubts by offering information on the revenue and its management. When James I’s chief minister, the Earl of Salisbury, produced a statement of revenue and expenditure in 1610, Sir Francis Bacon regarded it as opening up the arcana imperii to public gaze and stimulating public criticism.10 There were medieval precedents for special accountability arrangements for particular parliamentary grants: these were followed in 1624, when subsidies were given to support the King if, as expected, hostilities followed the abandonment of negotiations with Spain. The 1624 Subsidy Act was the first explicit attempt since the early fifteenth century to restrict the power of the Crown to use funds voted by parliament: the Act specified the purposes for which the money was provided, and stated that the money was to be paid not into the Exchequer, but to eight Treasurers named in the Act, closely linked to the City of London. They were to issue the money only for the purposes listed, and only under the warrant of members of the Council of War who were appointed by the King and named in the Act itself. The Treasurers and the Council were to be “answerable and accountable for their doings or proceedings herein to the Commons in Parliament.” Although the Commons requested, and received, the accounts of the money in 1625, their attempts to question the Council of War the following year about how the money had been used to recover the Palatinate—a point which the Commons had expressly decided not to include among the purposes it listed—were rejected by the king, who insisted that although the Subsidy Act had enabled the Commons to render a financial account, it did not permit them to make his advisers accountable for their advice.11 The story of the 1624 Subsidy Act showed the fundamental difficulty of securing effective accountability without also gaining political control. In the extraordinary conditions of 1640 and 1641, with an occupying Scottish army in Northern England, and a deep political crisis, the leaders of parliament were readily able to establish effective control over the disbursement of funds. Though their Subsidy Acts were based on the 1624 model, the authority to issue money was given this time to parliament itself. A year later, parliament was at war with the King, and over the ensuing years it created a fiscal system responsible only to itself.

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The proliferation of new funding streams to fight the war—most notoriously the Excise and the Weekly and Monthly Assessments—were designed to bypass the Exchequer entirely, including its audit function and the legal machinery for testing the legality of tax demands.12 Parliament’s command not only over decisions of what burdens to impose but also over how the resulting money would be spent created precisely the opposite problem to that of the 1620s: then, it lacked effective control over the expenditure of the money it had raised; now the close relationship between the power of raising money and the systems for spending it provided it with unlimited power, wide open to abuse. During the early 1640s the essential problem of the fiscal-military state—the creation of a closely related political, bureaucratic and military elite that had an interest in maintaining a large state apparatus and the power to raise the money to do so—was identified and debated. The establishment of a Committee of Accounts in 1644 was one approach to the issue—an extra-parliamentary body led by the Presbyterian veteran William Prynne whose role was to take an account of all committees and individuals with responsibility for the receipt or expenditure of money; another was the Self-Denying Ordinance—the removal of military office-holders from both Houses of Parliament. Both moves were deeply mired in the factional politics of the early 1640s and the struggle of Presbyterians and Independents; yet both reflected a concern with issues of propriety and the proper exercise of power, and the proliferation of local offices and officeholders in the parliamentary regime.13 The Long Parliament’s Accounts Committee and its debate on the relationship between executive responsibility and the structures of accountability were both highly influential in subsequent discussions of the subject, although in neither case was this immediately apparent. Prynne’s committee was abolished in 1649, and although others replaced it, the Exchequer regained much of its old position under the Protectorate in the 1650s. The confused politics following the dismissal of the Rump Parliament and the English republic in 1653 were not at all conducive to any more systematic approach to state finance, and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 put an end to the direct participation of parliament in the disbursement of the revenue, except in the first few months of the Restoration, when the Convention Parliament elected in 1660 was closely involved in the financial aspects of the disbandment of the old parliamentarian army, for which the funds were again paid into and held by the Chamber of the City of London and disbursed under the control of Treasurers most of whom were members of the House of Commons. Yet while the ordinary systems of prewar public finance were otherwise reinstated, it was impossible after the Restoration fully to


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return to prewar assumptions about the accountability arrangements for it. The first and most obvious reason for this was the nature of the revenue itself. The agreement to abandon some sources that had been particularly disliked before the war—particularly the Court of Wards— meant that the government had to undertake in 1660 a complete review and settlement of the permanent revenue, involving bargaining with the Convention Parliament. The inadequacy of the financial settlement which resulted—largely because of overoptimistic estimates of revenue yields—meant that government and parliament were engaged throughout the 1660s in an almost continuous dialogue on the permanent revenue. The government laid the inadequacy of the provision before the Cavalier Parliament in 1661, which accepted that an additional £300,000 was required to meet the £1.2 million estimated as the sum required to meet the normal peacetime expenditure. In 1662 a Committee was asked to inquire into the conduct of customs officials and consider how to improve the yield of the tax. Following the failure of the new Hearth Tax to produce as much as expected, the government made another attempt to bring the revenue up to £1.2 million in 1663, conceding a full inspection of the various branches of the revenue, although this did not succeed in producing a new additional fund.14 The second reason was the foreign policy of the Restoration regimes: between 1660 and 1688 the ambitions of Charles II and James II to operate as a major European power meant years of extraordinary expense. The wars of 1665–67 and 1672–74, a naval arms race with France and the Dutch republic, naval operations in the Mediterranean and a full mobilization for war in 1678 meant that government expenditure never fell back to pre–civil war levels.15 In the 1660s parliamentary taxation to meet the costs of war against the Dutch reached unprecedented levels. A supply of £2.5 million was granted in October 1664, £1.25 million a year later; and £1.8 million the year after that. From the beginning, a group of members raised a demand for specific accountability for these extraordinary taxes. In April 1664 they tried to insist on a mechanism similar to that in the 1624 Subsidy Act for any money granted for the War. A resolution in the Commons in 1665 for the presentation of an account of the use of the £1.25 million was acted on in 1666, and a committee was appointed to scrutinize the accounts. It was followed by the introduction and passage in the Commons of a bill to set up an accounts commission. The bill was strongly opposed by the government under the guidance of Charles II’s chief minister the Earl of Clarendon, who offered a royal commission of inquiry as a substitute; but its failure, and Clarendon’s removal from power in August 1667, led to the government’s acceptance of a statutory commission of accounts,

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partly in order to secure a parliamentary grant, but also because of the desire of Clarendon’s enemies to secure evidence against him and his allies. The immediate political context meant that the wider issue of accountability and control was ignored: the argument so strongly advanced by Clarendon that such an inspection would be against the royal prerogative was explicitly rejected. The echoes of the 1644 Accounts Committee were strong: the Commission clearly transferred responsibility for auditing and clearing accounts from the Exchequer to parliament, stating as its aim that “all such person and persons as shall appear guilty of any of the said frauds, exactions, negligences, defaults or abuses may be brought to condign punishment in Parliament or otherwise for the better prevention of the like crimes and misdemeanours.”16 The sequel, though, showed that despite the concession of a Commission, the Crown was not in reality prepared to accept the real and effective accountability that it implied; and neither was a substantial proportion of the House of Commons itself. In a series of debates over some of the commissioner’s conclusions on the Navy accounts in 1669, Members’ unease about the use of the Commons as a form of judicial tribunal was very evident.17 The debates were eventually abandoned without conclusion, and the Commission expired in 1672. The domestic political crisis of the end of the 1670s and 1680–81 subsumed serious discussion of the organizational aspects of government finance, and there is little evidence of the loyalist parliament of 1685 showing any inclination to continue the accountability debate. The 1688 Revolution, however, produced a political situation whose elements echoed previous episodes of rapid institutional development: a government with a weak title; a parliament—the Convention—whose members had been moulded by the experience of confrontation with previous governments; and a body of members whose political allegiance was confused by recent and rapid political change. William III’s government, faced with the imperative of obtaining revenue to sustain war with France and defend the Revolution of 1688, delivered to the Commons accounts of the state of each branch of the revenue in March 1689 as part of an attempt to secure a full grant of the permanent revenue; in October 1690 the accounts of revenue and expenditure were presented along with estimates for the army, navy, and ordnance for the subsequent year, a practice that soon became annual.18 During the autumn and winter, the Commons mounted inquiries on the progress of the war in Ireland and at sea, on maladministration in the Victualling Office, the Admiralty Board, and the provisioning of the Irish army. Against this background, the creation of a new Commission of Accounts was a natural development. A statutory Commission was


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established in 1691 with the apparent support of the Government, but with a membership that included many of those who had in the 1660s and 1670s argued for parliamentary or external scrutiny of government finance.19 The Commission was routinely renewed until April 1697, although after 1695 the momentum behind the Commission grew weaker as its membership became colonized by courtiers, and as the Whig and Tory parties strengthened their hold on English politics. The Commissions of the reign of Queen Anne, from 1702 to 1713, were widely seen as vehicles for the promotion of party agendas, rather than the “country” concerns of the Commissioners of the 1690s, and party interests were prominent in a number of other inquiries held at the time—for example, the investigation of deficiencies in the Admiralty in December 1707 which was sustained by only the Whigs, and a series of Tory-inspired investigations in 1711 and 1712 into the abuses of the Godolphin administration.20 For the half century or so after the death of Queen Anne in 1714, an interest in detailed inspections of government accounts seems to have decayed. A motion to appoint a statutory commission was defeated in 1715;21 a bill was lost at its third reading in 1742;22 motions to refer accounts to committees were regularly defeated as well.23 The aspiration to examine the accounts, however, had not entirely disappeared, and was regularly paraded by opposition politicians: William Pulteney demanded an account of the state of the public debt in 1726, which Robert Walpole dismissed as a dangerous request; Pulteney’s claim in 1727 that “it was the indisputable right of the House to have an account of all money granted” was treated with similar dismissiveness, despite a claim that “if this power of enquiry into the disposal of money was given up, all our privileges were of little value without that and the power of impeachment or maladministration fell with it, and then the Parliament would be no more than a state engine to stamp the measures of the administration and make it current, as a piece of silver was by the mint.”24 In 1735 and again in 1736, there were calls by Pulteney and William Wyndham to revive the Commissions of Accounts: Walpole responded that such a proceeding “would be a very extraordinary method of proceeding, a method which has not been practised for many years, and never was often practised.”25 In 1740, Lord Baltimore complained of ignorance of MPs about the accounts of the Navy, which “has given the commissioners and officers of the navy an authority without limits, it has given them a power which majesty itself has always been denied, of disposing of the public money without a reason for their demands, and without an account of their expences. . . . But for what end do we

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sit here? Is it to give a sanction to the wildest calculations, and grant supplies without asking how they are made use of ?”26 The reformer Richard Price reflected in 1778 on the inspiring history of the Accounts Commissions of the 1690s, and complained that “ever since those times the public accounts have been growing more complicated; and the temptations to profusion and embezzlement have been increasing with increasing luxury and dissipation. How astonishing then is it that every idea of such commissions should be now lost; and that, at a time when the nation is laboring under expenses almost too heavy to be borne, the passing of accounts by the House of Commons is become little more than a matter of form; our representatives scarcely thinking it worth their while to attend on such occasions, and millions of the public treasure being sometimes given away, in a few hours, just as proposed by the Treasury, without debate or inquiry.”27 In fact, well before the economical reform movement of the late 1770s and early 1780s, interest in the scrutiny of the public accounts had begun to revive. A committee had been appointed in 1763 to inquire into the accounts of the money expended on the war with France; it issued one lengthy report on the Ordnance Office.28 A similar committee was appointed the following session, although no report resulted, and the experiment was not repeated.29 But it did indicate that the vast expense of the war of 1756–63, coupled with the circumstances of its ending, had encouraged government to accept again a measure of public scrutiny. It was not until the later stages of another nearly ruinously expensive conflict—that with the American colonies—that scrutiny of the public accounts would be more fully accepted, with the creation of the Accounts Commission of 1780–87, which finally moved external oversight of public expenditure into a very different realm.30

State building and accountability In the century following the Restoration of the monarchy, attitudes to parliamentary oversight of the public accounts did undergo radical change. The two separate processes described at the beginning of this paper—of financial accountability through the Exchequer and political accountability through parliament—had become at least conceptually linked. The assumption that parliament had a right to debate and examine the public accounts was an enormously important step in the understanding of the state. Yet the real effect of that change was curiously limited, at least after the ending of the rumbustious experiment of triennial parliaments and vigorous party competition in 1694–1715. Parliament’s lack of interest


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in pursuing the public accounts in the early eighteenth century no doubt had much to do with the politics of the Walpole years: peace and public expenditure were kept almost artificially low. But it also had to do with the difficult associations of the call for greater accountability. First of all, the inspection of public accounts was closely associated with revolutionary regimes. From the beginning of the discussion of the subject, the creation of new systems of accountability outside the Exchequer was associated with the forced parliamentary modernization of the state during the Civil War. The primary model was the 1644 Commission of Accounts: it had been echoed in the 1667 Commission, and through it, in the Commissions of the 1690s. There were strong connections in conception, personnel, and ideology across the Commissions: William Prynne, the leader of the 1644 Committee, was concerned in the parliamentary discussions of the 1660s, as were many of his Presbyterian ideological allies and other figures involved in the debates of the 1640s; in the 1690s, the tradition of Presbyterian interest in the issue of accountability was maintained through figures such as Paul Foley or Robert Harley who moved from association with the Presbyterian political camp toward the country party, and ultimately (at least in the case of the latter) to the Tories. The association with the 1644 Committee and the Long Parliament represented an enormous obstacle to the wholehearted adoption of the idea of accountability. It was easy to identify in the arguments of the late 1660s a creeping return to the practices of the Long Parliament. The Earl of Clarendon’s account of his opposition to a statutory or parliamentary commission with power to pass the accounts is the clearest explanation of a concern felt by many about the growth of a culture of parliamentary accountability: it was a symptom, he argued, of a tendency in parliament “to extend their jurisdiction to cases they have nothing to do with; and that to restrain them with in their proper bounds and limits is as necessary, as it is to preserve them from being invaded. That this was such a new encroachment as had no bottom; and the scars were yet too fresh and green of those wounds which had been inflicted upon the kingdom from such usurpation.” In early 1675, there were demands for an inquiry into the whole revenue and expenditure in the context of Danby’s request for money to renovate the navy. The government turned it down—“ ’Tis not usual for this House to inspect the King’s Treasury,” Secretary of State Coventry claimed31—and even some members who were sympathetic to the proposal were doubtful about the sort of inspection being suggested, demanding that things should be “done in a parliamentary way . . . would have no more longparliament committees, to impose upon the House.”32 When supply for the navy was agreed in the following session a group of members revived

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the old scheme of paying money into the Chamber of London specifically for the navy, bypassing the Exchequer altogether.33 Now, however, the implications were regarded with particular suspicion. The bureaucrat (and auditor of the Exchequer) Sir George Downing argued that it was a dangerously revolutionary proposal: “you are the restorers of the Government, but this about the Chamber of London, is setting up a new Government . . . the Exchequer is one of the fundamental pillars of monarchy, the easiest and the cheapest . . . some are hot enough that the Exchequer is not to be trusted; when that trust is gone, the government is gone.”34 The activities of the Commissioners in the 1690s similarly raised eyebrows: Sir Robert Howard wrote to William III in July 1691 that “there is a design by a very great party, that the war, both by sea and land, should be managed by a Committee of Parliament,” and added that “this intelligence seems to be made good by the manner of the proceeding of the Commissioners for Accounts, who in many ways, exceed their power.”35 If Parliament was to be allowed to investigate the activities of all government officials, and to make them directly accountable, then it was difficult to see how monarchical or any executive government could be maintained. These were natural concerns for executive politicians: but parliamentarians were themselves wary of the precedent of the 1640s, and aware of the relationship between proper accountability and direct political control. Many saw a risk that responsibility for reviewing government accounts might drag them into a closer relationship with government and a greater obligation to provide money in response to requests than they wished to acknowledge. Even country politicians were extremely wary of the motives of government in providing detailed accounts and inviting the Commons to take a close look at them: Sir Thomas Meres said in 1675 that he had observed that “if once we begin to tumble papers over, we are wearied out, and give money, and leave the question.”36 Sir Thomas Clarges said after the Ordnance office apparently helped its debtors to promote a petition in the Commons in 1689, that “I think it very extraordinary that the Ordnance should make these reports here: it is to the Treasury they ought to apply. . . . This is making us Commissioners of Accounts, by bringing these Accounts to us”; William Garroway said it was “a dangerous precedent to make ourselves accountants. You are here to compute the War in gross . . . let them compute the charge for so many men; if they mis-spend it, let them answer it in God’s name. I would enter upon Accounts no further than to supply the present occasion. The deeper we entered upon Accounts, the deeper was always the charge.”37 Nearly a hundred years later, the Duke of


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Richmond described a situation that many Members of Parliament in the 1690s might have feared: “I wish to see the executive part of government revert to where the constitution has placed it, in the hands of the Crown, to be carried on by its ministers; those ministers under the control of Parliament, and Parliament under the control of the people. I would not have Parliament made, as it daily is, a party concerned in every act of state, whereby it becomes the executive, for which it is not calculated, and loses its superintending and controlling power, which is the main end of its institution.”38 At about the same time, Edmund Burke encountered a suspicion that accountability could be simply a mask to draw parliament into an unwelcome engagement with government when he presented his East India Bill as a measure that would make the East India Company directly accountable to parliament, through seven commissioners who were to be members of parliament, appointed by parliament: he told the Commons that “all political power which is set over men . . . ought to be some way or other exercised ultimately for their benefit . . . to whom then, would I make the East India Company accountable? Why, to Parliament, to be sure; to Parliament, from whom their trust was derived; to Parliament, which alone is capable of comprehending the magnitude of its object, and its abuse; and alone capable of an effectual legislative remedy.”39 But Burke’s aim was widely seen simply as a means of adding enormously to government patronage.40 Paradoxically, perhaps, there was an association between the creation of accountable government, and big government: the devices of accountability could be seen as the chains of co-option. A second association was with a particular tradition of politics, with what Colin Brooks has called the “country persuasion.”41 Those who were most associated with the demand for commissions of public accounts were often described as defenders of the “country” against the “court,” politicians who regarded themselves as independent of party, concerned principally with minimizing the burdens of government. Men such as the veteran specialist in public accounts Sir Thomas Clarges saw themselves and were seen in this light; others, most notably Robert Harley, were identified for at least part of their careers with this tradition of nonaligned politics. As Brooks has argued, country politicians placed a heavy emphasis on the “discharge of a trust, the public obligation, the sense of responsibility: the country persuasion insisted that these permeate all dealings, inform all conduct.”42 There was a relationship, albeit a complex one, between this tradition and the Presbyterians of the Civil War: Harley had begun his political career being described as a “Presbyterian”;

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William Prynne, back in the 1640s, had been the Presbyterian par excellence. Yet this association helped to condemn the pursuit of the reform and inspection of the public accounts to the status of a minority, and distinctly unfashionable interest. A third association, however, was with party politics and the practice of political opposition. Even if they were not always created as a result of the machinations of political factions or parties, and even if they relied on the exertion of a group of men whose commitment to the public good could be genuinely recognized, the success and permanence of the Commissions ultimately depended on their value to one or other powerful political interest group. There was, in other words, insufficient political interest in accounts on their own to allow for the survival of disinterested inquiry without the attraction of an investigation into the misdeeds of political rivals. The struggles of Presbyterians and Independents in 1644, of the Buckingham faction against the government interest in 1667, and the confused political situation of the early 1690s followed by the crystallizing of Whig and Tory camps toward the middle of the decade, all formed the backdrop to the creation of the successive Commissions of Accounts. The demand for inspections of the accounts and estimates pressed against Walpole’s governments in the 1720s and 1730s was mainly the work of Walpole’s bitterest political opponents, men such as William Pulteney or William Shippen, and was condemned as factious or dangerous. Even the movement for economical reform in the late 1770s began to pay dividends because it had been promoted for political advantage by a Whig faction.43 Partisan politics were central to the development of the language and practice of accountability. The Tory politician Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, celebrated the fact in the mid-1730s: “Ministers . . . may be called to account by the passion, by the prejudice, if you will, of such assemblies, oftener, perhaps, than they deserve to be; or their errors may be censured, or their faults be punished, in a greater degree, and with more rigour, not only than true political justice requires, which should always be tempered with mercy, but even than strict justice exacts. But as one of these is a fault, if it be a fault, on the best side, and as the other will certainly happen very seldom, it does not seem reasonable, that a door should be opened to corruption and dependency, in order to prevent them. Nay, farther, this vigilance, and this severity of Parliaments, which we here suppose, will not fail to have some very good effects that are more than sufficient to balance the supposed ill effects. Among the rest, they may render the rash, who are in power, more cautious, and the bold more modest. They may render fools less fond of power, and awe even knaves into honesty.


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It were better, surely, that able and good men should now and then suffer, nay, the good man who suffered would be himself of his opinion, than that the adulation and servility of Parliaments, which are the necessary consequences of corruption and dependency, should ever contribute to make the court become, in any future age, a sanctuary for pickpockets, and a hospital for changelings.”44 When the reform of public finance finally became a project with serious political drive behind it, it was, perhaps, in part because these elements ceased to be liabilities and started to become assets. By the 1770s, the economical reform movement could build on a growing activism among politicians whose commitment to “the public good” and recognition of government as a sort of public trust strongly echoed the characteristics of the politicians of the “country persuasion” in the 1690s.45 The members of the Accounts Commission of 1780–87 were, as John Torrance has argued, explicitly committed to a broadly similar conception of government, even if their ideas of economy were backed by a much more ambitious ideology of reform and regeneration—in effect, a deliberate programme of statebuilding.46 By the 1770s the association of the scrutiny of public accounts with past radicalism may have been a point in its favor, at least with the more determined elements of the reform movement; and the political pressure that could be exerted by a determined opposition with real prospects of achieving power made the reform of public finance a cause with realistic prospects of success, rather than seeming like another stick with which to beat a government. Even then, although scrutiny of the public accounts improved, effective accountability for public money was still elusive. The British system lacked the clarity and directness of the system invented in France in the constitution of 1793, which seems to have brought the word into the English political vocabulary.47 Parliamentary control of the system of government finance remained compromised by the retention of the theory, and language, of royal government, by, as Clarendon had emphasized in the 1660s, a perceived need to insulate royal officials from the immediate political pressure of parliament. And perhaps—and more speculatively—the limits to parliamentary accountability within the British structure could have been as much a strength of the system as a weakness, helping to insulate public finance from political pressure to increase it: while scrutiny and exposure of the public accounts did, probably, make government finance less prone to corruption than it otherwise might have been, the distancing of executive government from parliamentary control may have helped to make it less prone to extravagance or adventurism.

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Notes 1. Or “accomptable.” Accountability in this sense—particularly applied to the oversight of public finances—probably entered the British and American political vocabulary as a result of the French constitution of 1793: see Authentic Copy of the New Constitution of France, Adopted by the National Convention, June 23, 1793 (London, 1793), p. 14. Other instances of the word used politically (as opposed to morally) found on Eighteenth Century Collections Online postdate this, and come mostly from the United States. 2. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989), esp. pp. 143–60; Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), p. 218; Martin Daunton, “Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation, 1815–1914,” in The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914, ed. Donald Winch and Patrick K. O’Brien (Oxford, 2002), p. 320. 3. See Michael Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation in SeventeenthCentury England (Woodbridge, 1994). 4. For Grand Juries and their role, see William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, vol. I, 7th ed. (1956), p. 321, vol. X (1938), pp. 146–8; and S & B Webb, English Local Government Vol. 1: The Parish and the County, pp. 446ff. 5. Edward Coke, The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England; Concerning the Jurisdiction of Courtes (London, 1669), pp. 11, 24. 6. Debates of the House of Commons, from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694. Collected by the Hon. Anchitell Grey, . . . In ten volumes. . . . (London, 1763), III, 84 [in further citations, Grey, Debates] 7. P. Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 138. 8. Parliamentary Debates, 1610, cited in G.L. Harriss, “Medieval Doctrines in the Debates on Supply, 1610–29,” in Faction and Parliament, ed. K. Sharpe (Oxford, 1978), p. 85. 9. Proceedings in Parliament 1625, ed. Maija Jansson and William B. Bidwell (New Haven, CT, 1987), pp. 392, 397. 10. The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, V, 26, cited in Harris, “Medieval Doctrines in the Debates on Supply, 1610–29,” p. 84. 11. See P. Seaward, “The Cavalier Parliament, the 1667 Accounts Commission and the Idea of Accountability,” in Parliament at Work, ed. C.R. Kyle and J. Peacey (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 149–51, and the sources cited there. 12. See the table in G.R. Aylmer, The State’s Servants: The Civil Service of the English Republic, 1649–1660 (London, 1973), pp. 26–27 13. Aylmer, The State’s Servants, pp. 287–8; J. Peacey, “Politics, Accounts and Propaganda in the Long Parliament,” in Parliament at Work, ed. Kyle and Peacey, pp. 59–78.


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14. See Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament, pp. 111–18. 15. Restoration public finance is dealt with magisterially by C.D. Chandaman, The English Public Revenue, 1660–1688 (Oxford, 1975). 16. A fuller account of the genesis of the Commission is given in Seaward, “The Cavalier Parliament, the 1667 Accounts Commission and the idea of accountability,” pp. 149–68. 17. See, for example, Grey, Debates, I: 159, 214. 18. See Commons Journals, X, 431–32, 434–40, 547–48, 711–13, etc; and The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1690–1715 (Cambridge, 2002), I, Introductory Survey, ed. David Hayton. 19. For details of its establishment, see J.A. Downie, “The Commission of Public Accounts and the Formation of the Country Party,” English Historical Review, XCI (1976): 36–37, and The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1690–1715, I: 374–8. A number of separate Committees continued to conduct inquiries on individual classes of accounts: for details, see ibid., 403. 20. The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1690–1715, I: 403–4. 21. Commons Journals, XVIII: 138. 22. Commons Journals, XXIV: 268. 23. Commons Journals, XXII: 535 (1735); XXIV: 53 (1741), 621 (1742); XXV: 794 (1748): see also A General Index to or digest of the seventeen volumes of the Journals of the Honourable House of Commons from Vol. XVIII to XXIV inclusive (London, 1774), under Accounts &c, Questions negatived, Accounts Public; House: Appoints Committees of the whole House (Accounts Public), Appoints Select Committees (Money, Public). 24. The Parliamentary Diary of Sir Edward Knatchbull, ed. A.N. Newman, Camden 3rd series, vol. xciv, p. 64. 25. The Parliamentary History of England, February 24, 1735. 26. Quoted in Daniel Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965), p. 452. For objections to the Navy estimates, and especially to the practice of employing more seamen than had been provided for, and paying for them by obtaining special grants to cover the consequent debt, see The Parliamentary History of England From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, ed. W. Cobbett, 1806–1820, VII: 926–27, 978. 27. Richard Price, The General Introduction and Supplement to the Two Tracts on Civil Liberty, the War with America, and the Finances of the Kingdom. . . . (London, 1778), p. xxii. 28. Commons Journals, XXIX: 452, 491, 527, 635–45. 29. Commons Journals, XXX: 762. 30. For the appointment of the 1780 Commission, see John Torrance, “Social Class and Bureaucratic Innovation: the Commissioners for Examining the Public Accounts, 1780–87,” Past and Present 78 (1978), pp. 56–81. 31. Grey, Debates, II: 98.

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62 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

Grey, Debates, III: 35. Grey, Debates, III: 349–72. Grey, Debates, III: 360. Quoted by Downie, “The Commission of Public Accounts and the Emergence of the Country Party,” p. 48. Grey, Debates, III: 307. The Parliamentary History of England, V: 438. A Letter from the Late Duke of Richmond . . . [on] Annual Parliaments and Universal Suffrage August 1783 (London, 1824), p. 358. Dec. 1, 1783, quoted by John Cannon, The Fox-North Coalition 1782–84 (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 109–10. Philip Harling, The Waning of Old Corruption (Oxford, 1996), p. 40. See Colin Brooks, “The Country Persuasion and Political Responsibility in England in the 1690s,” Parliaments, Estates and Representation, IV (1984), pp. 135–46. Ibid., pp. 142–43. On which, see John Norris, Shelburne and Reform (London, 1963), pp. 100–31. Bolingbroke, Political Writings, ed. David Armitage (Cambridge, 1997), p. 161. See Richard Connors, “ ‘The Grand Inquest of the Nation’: Parliamentary Committees and Social Policy in Mid-Eighteenth Century England,” in Parliamentary History 14 (1995), pp. 285–313. Torrance,“Social Class and Bureaucratic Innovation,” pp. 72–80. See n. 1. See also Julian Hoppit, “Checking the Leviathan, 1688–1832” in Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914, ed. Donald Winch and Patrick K. O’Brien (Oxford, 2002), p. 279, for the influence of French public finance reform under Necker and in the early eighteenth century on British reforms.

Select Bibliography The literature on British public finance in the eighteenth century is considerable. In addition to those works quoted in the footnotes, it includes P.G.M. Dickson’s The Financial Revolution in England: A study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London, 1967) and Henry Roseveare’s The Treasury, 1660–1870: The Foundations of Control (London, 1973). Detailed work on parliamentary oversight of the revenue in the seventeenth and eighteenth century is mainly to be found in the works cited in the notes.

Chapter 3

Boroughmongering, Biography, and the Reform of P arliament: James B oswell and the Earl of L onsdale Gordon Tur nbull

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his chapter assesses James Boswell’s private diary records of his tumultuous political association in the late 1780s with James Lowther, first Earl of Lonsdale, the ruthless boroughmonger from northwest England, who at the height of his power controlled nine seats in the House of Commons. It argues that Boswell’s swerve from his own rather erratic and misguided aspirations to a seat in parliament, to the dissemination of an implied parliamentary vision instead in a literary biography (The Life of Johnson) aligns him subtly with the post–1760s move for a reform of parliament more usually associated with Radicalism. James Boswell (1740–95), Scottish-born biographer of Samuel Johnson but increasingly acknowledged in our own times (since the recoveries and the ongoing publication of many of his private papers) as a compelling confessional diarist and correspondent, nurtured essentially quixotic lifelong hopes for a seat in the British Parliament. He regretted to the end of his days that he never represented his Scottish county, Ayrshire, as an independent candidate, a wish impelled generally by a sincere resentment at the way Scottish elections were managed during the “Dundas Despotism.”1 He reports in his diary that he “exulted” on

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the day—April 19, 1790—that the House of Lords, reversing a decision of the Scottish Court of Session, abolished the longstanding practice of creating “nominal and fictitious” votes, which he had consistently opposed.2 General unsuitability for the task kept him out: as his close friend William Johnson Temple candidly told him in a letter late in his life (March 5, 1795), “You affected a character incompatible with assiduity and business.” But that was not necessarily an impediment to any number of other contemporary British parliamentary careers, and he may have done as well as or better than, say, George Selwyn (1719–91) or others who tend to turn up in biographical dictionaries as “MP and wit.” In any case, his active ambitions came to an unexpected and definitive end when the notoriously tyrannical and ill-tempered northern boroughmonger James Lowther (1736–1802), first Earl of Lonsdale, from whom Boswell had hoped for patronage that might ultimately have become parliamentary, was instead roused eventually (by the incompatibility of Boswell’s wish for personal and political independence, and Lonsdale’s desire for absolute mastery over those he brought in) to a murderous fury. Lonsdale threatened, on June 17, 1790, to end not only Boswell’s parliamentary ambitions, but possibly his life, via a duel, with “a bullet in your belly.” Boswell, in great alarm but describing himself in his diary account as “calm and determined,” manfully inquired at Barnet (they were on their way north to Lonsdale’s properties at Lowther, Whitehaven, and Carlisle), whether any regiment might be quartered nearby that he might seek pistols, and a second, from among the officers. A duel was only narrowly averted when Boswell, looking “upon him really as a madman, and wishing upon principle never to have a duel if I could avoid it with credit,” protested that he had meant no attack upon Lonsdale’s honor. Lonsdale’s temper abated, and an uneasy calm prevailed.3 Boswell’s case was far from unique in Lonsdale’s history in this regard. In the words of Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, Lonsdale’s “fiery and overbearing temper combining with a fearless disposition, scarcely under the dominion of reason at all times, led him into perpetual quarrels, terminating frequently in duels: for he never declined giving satisfaction, and frequently demanded it of others.”4 Indeed, Boswell’s diary at one point quotes Lonsdale alleging reasons not previously known for why the Duke of Norfolk, Lonsdale’s political opponent in Carlisle, for which he sat as MP until he succeeded to the dukedom in 1786, withdrew a petition against Lonsdale over the matter of a Westmoreland Militia: Lord L. told me what I must not forget, that when the present Duke of Norfolk was going to present a petition against him in Parliament

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concerning the Westmoreland Militia, he took him upstairs to Bellamy’s and told him, “You have nothing to do with Westmoreland. The petition is false, but your presenting it may make an impression. I tell you that I shall consider your doing it as personal to me. You shall answer for it. And if you have any affairs to settle, don’t delay, for one of us shall die.” He at first shilly-shallied and talked of a Member’s having a right to present any petition, then said, “I can say nothing, for is this not a threat?” Lord L. said, “I do not threaten. I only tell you what I am resolved to do,” upon which he said he would consider of it, and next morning said he would not present the petition. “But,” said he,“this is not to be mentioned.” Lord L. said, “No. You won’t mention it; I shall not.”5

A brief biographical recapitulation: Sir James Lowther, 5th Bt. of Lowther (of the first creation) was the son of Robert Lowther, a Governor of Barbados, and Katherine Pennington, daughter of Sir Joseph Pennington (who was MP for Cumberland 1734–44). He was created, despite massive unpopularity and after some patronage of the younger Pitt (who sat on his interest for Appleby), first Earl of Lonsdale in 1784, the year in which he was at the height of his political influence as a boroughmonger in the northwest of England. He came from an old and established Cumbrian family, owed his rise to wealth and prominence to the deaths of three kinsmen, which brought him colossal wealth—estimated at more than £2 million—that made him, it was said, the richest commoner in Britain. He was brought up by his formidable and ambitious mother. In 1761, he married Lady Mary Stuart, daughter of the Earl of Bute (the marriage was loveless, and a failure). He was driven obsessively by a need for local power, provincially based in England’s northwest, though he seems to have had no actual ministerial ambitions. By his inheritances, he controlled massive coal and other mines and vast fleets and trading lanes and services, mostly using the port and harbor of Whitehaven, to sail to the ports of England and Ireland and the colonies. His elections, on which he lavished extraordinary sums of money while famously mean and penurious in the smallest of material matters otherwise—he was a combination of “exorbitant tyranny and extreme narrowness” (Experiment 116)—were an almost endless series of controversies, victories followed by unseatings, by-elections, more unseatings on petition by Committee of the House of Commons, and further by-elections. Most victories came by the shameless creation of honorary freemen—Lowther’s “mushrooms” or “toadstools,” as his detractors termed them (voters created overnight). By 1784 he controlled nine seats: two each for Westmoreland, Cockermouth and

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Haslemere (a rotten borough in Surrey), and one each for Cumberland, Appleby, and Carlisle. His members, known as “Lowther’s ninepins,” were entirely managed by him. The last sentences of John Brooke’s entry on him summarize him thus: “ ‘One of the most worthless men in his Majesty’s dominions,’ wrote Sir Edward Blackett (Feb 16, 1786); ‘you never hear him spoken of but with the greatest abhorrence.’ It is a typical judgment.”6 Boswell’s involvement with Lowther, who may have had thoughts at first of bringing him in as one of his members, and eventually made him Recorder (chief legal officer) of Carlisle, came from Boswell’s very public campaign to attract his notice. Boswell had been first impressed by Lowther when he glimpsed him at the Carlisle assizes in August 1778, then wrote favorably of him in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) and his second Letter to the People of Scotland (1785). On July 21, 1786 in London, he received a card from Lonsdale inviting him to dine. Things began cordially enough. Boswell applied for the Recordership of Carlisle, and Lonsdale countered by asking Boswell to serve as counsel to the Carlisle mayor in an ensuing by-election, an office in which Boswell served creditably enough. The record of their dealings covers three main periods: November–December 1786, chiefly in Carlisle, for the election in which Lonsdale’s candidate, Edward Knubley, was successful;7 from December 1787 to January 1788, in London, at a freezing and uncomfortable Lowther Hall, and at Whitehaven; and in the summer of 1790, on July 14 of which year Boswell’s resignation as Recorder took effect. Boswell, as was typical with him, turned those who made profound impressions on him into adumbrated biographies. The journals contain many phantom or shadow lives, material that might have developed had he lived longer, or less irregularly, into biographies as his records of Paoli and Johnson did. The records of Lonsdale are written with same evidentiary eye, anecdotal revealingness, and percipient detail that characterize his published work on eminent men, and offer fresh and unique intimate contemporary biographical records of this widely detested man so dominant in northern English parliamentary conduct in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Lonsdale emerges in general from these pages, as I have argued elsewhere, essentially as the demonic inverse of the Boswellian Johnson—the magisterial conversationalist who once admitted that he “talked for Victory.”8 Lonsdale pathologically dominates not only his cowering train of subordinates, but all social settings, and Boswell implies a subtle psychological continuity between Londsale’s obsessive need for social power and his drive to a wider political and commercial dominance. A long and painfully recurring pattern emerges from the diary records, in which Lonsdale in


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his dealings with his cringing and brutalized entourage of MPs and other hangers-on capriciously, arbitrarily, and even sadistically gives or withholds such basic necessities as food, drink, warmth, and sleep. He keeps erratic hours, obliges his entourage to wait, and starve if necessary. He eats before them, retains the premium wines (Madeira and claret) for himself, and dispenses only inferior stuff (December 9–10, 1786; Experiment 115–16) to those around him. None may call for wine himself, but “had it given him just when the fancy struck L.” (December 27, 1787; Experiment 166). He deprives them, in a freezing Cumberland winter, of dry seasoned wood for their fires (December 27, 1787, Experiment 166), and obliges them to seek out (what he owns untold amounts of) coal. He sleeps before them after eating, but will not allow the company to leave the table. They find themselves surreptitiously obliged to seek out and befriend housekeepers and servants to provide them with secret supplies (December 25, 1787, Experiment 165). All the while, Boswell and the wretched assembly (this mini-parliament of MPs) huddle in unease, infantilized in dependent wretchedness.9 The emotions and scenes at Lowther Hall and Whitehaven Castle suggest nothing so much as the atmosphere of the Walpole Gothic, an Otrantolike space from which Boswell, reminded in middle age of his feelings of boyhood abjection in the presence of his forbidding father, Lord Auchinleck, seeks to escape a terrifying and ever-enlarging masculine/ancestral and emasculating entity. At the first meeting during the 1785 Carlisle by-election, the dinner scene is represented by Boswell explicitly as a grotesque parody Senate. “He [i.e., Lonsdale] did all the talking. Three members, Satterthwaite, Garforth, Colonel Lowther, were utterly quiet. ‘Like Cato, gives his little senate laws.’ ‘Yes,’ might say wit, ‘gives etc. But not like Cato.’ ” (November 29, 1786; Experiment 103). Later, in a summary of many such situations: “[W]e all sat in vile, timid restraint” (December 26, 1787, Experiment 165). In micropolitical terms, and symbolically in the larger political landscape of Britain, Lonsdale—in the arbitrary and capricious giving and withholding of basic rights—embodies in Boswell’s pages power as despotism, the untrammeled will of both propertied commercial interests and the nobility. Unchecked and unbalanced (in every sense, including the psychomedical), he represents the annihilation of British “liberty.” Boswell’s scenes represent, in a larger sense, the shackled and unrepresentative patronage-based parliament. The diary pages recording Boswell’s subservience—along with that of the rest of Lonsdale’s cringing set of pocket-borough ninepins masquerading as MPs—and the pages of the Life of Johnson (eventually published in 1791) he was crafting at the same time, implicitly address

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each other.10 Boswell in fact (almost at the cost of his life) rebels against the subservience. The MPs do not. When eventually free of his commitment to Lonsdale (his resignation as Recorder took effect on July 14, 1790), he renewed in London his suspended work on the Life of Johnson with purpose and gusto. Boswell’s narrative encodes, it can be shown, a personal or micropolitical correlative of a wider revulsion at the ways elections were managed and controlled at this time, one that led— broadly speaking—to radicalism (something with which Boswell is not typically in biography and criticism of him aligned). What emerges is a sense that literature (in this case the deployment of a certain kind of vision in the popular Life of Johnson) that offers Boswell a more effective channel of political reformism than parliament could have, allowing him a liberty to express what inhibition by political patronage would have denied. Boswell first met Johnson in May 1763, at the time of the wellchronicled Wilkes North Briton No. 45 controversy. The record of that period, in the now famous London Journal 1762–1763, caught public notice when first published in 1950 mostly for its occasional racy sexual episodes and the first dawning of Boswell’s fascination with Johnson’s remarkable conversational prowess. But in fact, meetings with parliamentarians, military officers, and other potentates and purveyors of influence outnumber meetings with prostitutes and literati in that journal by a great number, and it is fundamentally a document of link building, power networking, and Anglo-Scot dynastic patterns of patronage. Central to young Boswell’s development in London at this time is its Bute-era atmosphere of 1762–63 Peace of Paris negotiation, treaty making, and end-of-hostilities compromise building. With the controversial conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, Bute leaves office shortly before Boswell leaves London for the continent to study law at Utrecht, and the journal parallels these departures as imperfect but necessary acts of compromise and capitulation (Boswell to his rebarbative father’s wishes that he follow a career in Scots law). Already, however, Boswell had been begun his record keeping of Johnson’s life and opinions, and an inchoate but real ambition to be his biographer had taken shape. That was Boswell’s selfredemption after his personal Bute-like fall. At the same time as all this, he was captivated by the opposite charisma of John Wilkes. Boswell first glimpsed him at a meeting of the Beefsteak Club on November 27, 1762, was introduced to him, and to his collaborator on the North Briton, Charles Churchill, on May 24, 1763, was sending copies of the North Briton weekly to a friend in Edinburgh, and was attemping himself, without success, to have essays puplished in it.11


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The pair developed a friendship when Boswell spent three weeks on his Grand Tour with the outlawed Wilkes in Italy in 1765. At the time of his servitude to Lonsdale, Boswell was concurrently at work (psychologically as well as practically) on the Life of Johnson, and the period of Johnson’s life he mentions (at Whitehaven) specifically concerns the late 1770s. The twentieth-century recovery of the private journals and other papers allows us to see the Life and the diaries out of which it was in large part quarried in relation to one another. In short, the depiction of Johnson (and others) in the published biography is in crucial senses an argument with (i.e., against) the version of parliament embodied in the account of Lonsdale and his hamstrung and silenced MPs of these years. A cluster of MPs kept “in vile, timid restraint” sums up both the condition of the ninepins in particular, and the parliament itself in its crudest and most reduced symbolic form. Boswell (my argument here runs against the grain of most biographical accounts of the man) is thus more intuitively aligned with the visions of radicalism then in operation. In this light it is worth revisiting one of the best-known sequences in the Life, Johnson’s dinner, into which Boswell astutely manipulated him, with Wilkes at the home of the publishers, the Dilly brothers, on May 15, 1776. Wilkes, after the endless Middlesex election affrays, had finally taken his seat in parliament in 1774, and the dinner at the Dillys’ took place a mere few weeks after he spoke (March 21, 1776) attacking the irregularities of the electoral system and made the British eighteenth-century’s first important call for a radical extension of, and a more democratic version of, electoral franchise. Boswell kept only a few brief jottings of the dinner occasion itself at the time. The event, one of the most elaborated set-pieces in the whole Life, was written up more than a decade later, that is, during and in the aftermath of Boswell’s revulsion from Lonsdale’s boroughmongering career. The contemporary figures with whom Lonsdale aligns himself (in Boswell’s records of conversation) are the likes of Sir Thomas Rumbold and Warren Hastings, versions on a massive continental scale of his own politics by coercion, economic bullying, bribery, and tyranny. He claims to have been “the man who quashed the prosecution,” which he thought “oppressive and cruel,” “against Rumbold”—Governor of Madras, dismissed from the service of the East India Company in 1781, and charged with responsibility for the war in the Carnatic because of corrupt and oppressive dealings with the native Indian rulers (January 2, 1788; Experiment 177 and nn. 3–4). Lonsdale “said if he had been in the House of Commons

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he would have quashed the affair of Hastings too” (January 2, 1788). Those whom he abuses and belittles include, pointedly, Edmund Burke.: “L. abused Burke as an unprincipled, wrong-headed fellow. . . .” Lonsdale was “heated” that Boswell “did not acquiesce.” (January 2, 1786; Experiment 176). Lonsdale’s “insensibility to Burke’s talents is amazing” (January 2, 1788; Experiment 178). Burke is of course the most important of the secondary heroes of the Life, and the formidable Johnson, famously, conceded ground only to Burke in Boswell’s pages: “When Johnson was ill, and unable to exert himself as much as usual without fatigue, Mr Burke having been mentioned, he said: ‘That fellow calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now it would kill me’ ” (Life, 696). Burke in his turn declared that had Johnson come early into parliament, “he certainly would have been the greatest speaker that ever was there” (Life, 452). Lonsdale, by contrast, “would not allow that public speaking had any effect in Parliament”(January 2, 1788; Experiment 176.) In this famous episode of the Wilkes/Johnson dinner, Boswell, having been invited by his hospitable publisher friends the Dilly brothers to dine and “to meet Mr. Wilkes and some more gentlemen,” suggests the inclusion of Johnson, who found Wilkes’s character and politics repellent. In the first Johnsonian conversation Boswell records (May 16, 1763), Johnson declared: “Wilkes is safe in the eye of the law. But he is an abusive scoundrel; and instead of sending my Lord Chief Justice to him, I would send a parcel of footmen to him and have him well ducked.”12 Boswell as biographer frequently liked to see Johnson in striking and even confrontational situations, to observe and record his reactions. Edward Dilly naturally balks at the suggestion, but Boswell responds: “ ‘Come . . . if you’ll let me negociate for you, I will be answerable that all shall go well’ ” (Life 765). There follow some passages of astute and manipulative and eventually successful Boswellian negotiation, first with Johnson, and then with the poet Anna Williams, a member of his household, with whom Johnson had an arrangement to dine at home on that day. Once at the Dillys’, Johnson is indeed initially disconcerted by the company, but Wilkes (who appears favorably throughout Boswell’s report of the occasion) seats himself next to Johnson at dinner, “and behaved to him with so much attention and politeness, that he gained upon him insensibly” (Life 768). The scene unfolds over many pages and many topics, and difference at length dissolves. Years later, on May 8, 1781, Boswell writes: “I had the pleasure of again dining with [Johnson] and Mr. Wilkes, at Mr. Dilly’s. No negociation was now required to bring them together; for Johnson was so well satisfied with the former interview, that he was very glad to meet


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Wilkes again. . . .” (Life, 1143). By the end of this dinner, Wilkes asks for, and Johnson agrees to provide, a present of his Lives of the Poets, since, says Wilkes slyly, he is “a poor patriot, who cannot afford to buy them.”(“Patriotism is,” in one of Johnson’s most frequently invoked thunderous pronouncements, “the last refuge of a scoundrel”; April 1775, Life, 615). As the dinner company gradually falls away, Boswell was struck with observing Dr. Samuel Johnson and John Wilkes, Esq., literally tête-à-tête; for they were reclined upon their chairs, with their heads leaning almost close to each other, and talking earnestly, in a kind of confidential whisper, of the personal quarrel between George the Second and the King of Prussia. Such a scene of perfectly easy sociality between two such opponents in the war of political controversy, as that which I now beheld, would have been an excellent subject for a picture. (Life 1147)

The rancor of “personal quarrel” and indeed of international “war” now has no place. In fact, earlier in the Life (in 1777, the year after the first dinner), Johnson has already observed that Wilkes “has always been at me; but I would do Jack a kindness, rather than not. The contest is now over” (Life 862). In his account of that first sociable assembly at the Dillys’, Boswell gives the last word, crucially, to Burke: “Mr. Burke gave me much credit for this successful negociation; and pleasantly said, that ‘there was nothing equal to it in the whole history of the Corps Diplomatique’ ” (Life 776). Negotiation, amicability, civility, end-of-hostilities compromise: the Johnson/Wilkes fusion of political opposites offers a Boswellian vision of British assembly that overturns the almost concurrently recorded scenes of Lonsdale’s cringing and brutalized retinue, sitting in “vile, timid restraint.” “Starting with the Wilkite petitioning movement in the late 1760s . . . ,” writes H.T. Dickinson, “the radicals began to press for an extensive measure of parliamentary reform that would make the House of Commons more responsive to public opinion at large.” After the “first step” of Place and Pension Bills, an “extension of the franchise and a redistribution of seats would be more effective in making the House of Commons the representative assembly of the whole people. . . . The radicals wanted the people, even those at present without the vote, to exert a powerful influence over Parliament.”13 The period from the 1760s to the 1780s (in the trajectory traced authoritatively in Dickinson’s chapter 6, “The Development of a Radical Ideology,”) saw, concurrently the growth and development of Lonsdale’s massive northwestern boroughmongering power; the steady move from a Country to a radical reform platform fueled by complex resentments at

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the non-representative quality of the Court-and-patronage based operations of parliament and aimed at making the House of Commons a more genuinely representative assembly of the whole people; and the span of Boswell’s association with Johnson (they met in 1763, Johnson died in 1784), and the replacement of his hope for political office by a desire to disseminate his vision via a popular biography. A child of the Edinburgh Enlightenment, his legal career impelled by a career-destroying Smithian sympathy for the underclass criminal client, Boswell sincerely believed himself politically a “feudal” Tory and Royalist, but his deeper instincts in his writings can be discerned pulling him elsewhere. The diaries’ recovery and publication in our time refute the Victorian image of Boswell as mere Tory toady and tuft-hunter, and the many phantom or adumbrated biographies in their pages are drawn democratically, as much from the regions of the abject, the poor, and the obscure, and are thus representative of the whole of post–Union Great Britain (in a way parliament was not). The scene at the Dillys’ in 1776 collects the Tory and Church of England man Johnson, the firebrand radical Wilkes, the Virginian patriot Arthur Lee, the Dissenter-publisher Dilly brothers, with the post–Union Lowland Scot, Boswell, as enabler, or goodnatured social maestro. The assembly offers a post–‘Forty-Five-Uprising cessation of civil feuding, and (reformist but not revolutionary) the obliteration of the styles of political difference that needs to resolve itself in an internecine British violence, embodying, instead, ideals of inclusiveness and social civility. In the pages of The Life of Johnson, the once powerful and intimidating Earl of Lonsdale makes no appearance of any kind. Boswell had very different operations of power to advocate.

Notes 1. The term is taken from the title of Michael Fry’s The Dundas Despotism (Edinburgh, 1992), although the achievement of Fry’s study is to challenge the tenacious notion that Henry Dundas (and later his son Robert Dundas) oversaw a rule based on “authoritarianism or corruption” (p. 384). Boswell, for his part, remained both fascinated and infuriated by Henry Dundas’s rise to power. For a succinct overview of Boswell’s ineffectual forays into parliamentary politics, see Frank Brady, Boswell’s Political Career (New Haven, CT and London, 1965). 2. Boswell, The Great Biographer: 1789–1795, ed. Marlies K. Danziger and Frank Brady (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), p. 47, p. 47n2. This volume is referred to hereafter as Biographer. 3. Biographer, pp. 67–68. 4. Cited in Frank Brady, James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769–1795 (New York, 1984). pp. 344–45.


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5. January 5, 1788; Boswell, The English Experiment: 1785–1789, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, London, 1986), p. 181. The volume is cited hereafter as Experiment. Charles Howard (1746–1815), Earl of Surrey, sat for Carlisle from 1780 until he succeeded as Duke of Norfolk in August 1786. He and Lonsdale were fierce opponents, and in the 1780s was himself a considerable boroughmonger. 6. Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790, 2 (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1964), p. 60. 7. Edward Knubley (d. 1815), had been appointed sheriff of Cumberland in 1785. His victory in this by-election was short-lived, as he was unseated on petition in 1787. 8. Gordon Turnbull, “Boswell and the Idea of Exile,” in Boswell in Scotland and Beyond, ed. Thomas Crawford, Association for Scottish Literary Studies, Occasional Papers No. 12 (Glasgow, 1997), pp. 89–103. 9. Apart from local officials in Carlisle and elsewhere, the names of the MPs appearing most frequently in Boswell’s writings about Lonsdale are: Knubley, John Baynes Garforth (?1722–1808; Cockermouth 1780–84 and 1790–1802, and Haslemere 1784–90), James Clarke Satterthwaite ca. 1746–?1818; Cockermouth 1784–90; Carlisle 1790–March 1791; Haslemere June 1791–1802; and Col. James Lowther 1753–1837; Westmorland December 1775–1812, Appleby 1812–18). In the summary of Namier and Brooke: “Before 1784, Lowther returned some distinguished Members to Parliament. . . . All either quarrelled with him or at the first opportunity sought to break the connexion. But of the twelve Members returned by Lowther at the general election of 1784 or at by-elections before 1790, only two . . . are known to have spoken in the House. . . . Not one of the twelve reached any sort of distinction in the Commons, and most could never have been returned without a patron” (House of Commons, II: 59). 10. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD. 1st ed. 1791. The edition cited in this essay (as Life) is James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R.W. Chapman, introduction by Pat Rogers (repr. Oxford, 1983). 11. Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, ed. F.A. Pottle (New York, 1950), pp. 52, 76, 266, 189, n. 5. 12. London Journal 1762–1763, p. 261. 13. H.T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in EighteenthCentury Britain (London, 1977), pp. 195–97.

Select Bibliography Brady, Frank. Boswell’s Political Career. New Haven, CT and London, 1965. ———. James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769–1795. New York, 1984. Dickinson, H.T. Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in EighteenthCentury Britain. London, 1977.


Chapter 4

The Unrepresentable French? David A. Bell

I

n surveying the history of national representative institutions in France between 1500 and 1800, the first words that come to mind are “abject failure.” The familiar and sad story goes as follows. After having fallen into abeyance at the end of the fifteenth century, the late medieval institution known as the Estates General met on five occasions between 1560 and 1615. It consisted of three chambers—one each for the clergy, nobility, and commons—and convened only on the king’s command, for a single, extended session. Then, between 1615 and 1789, it did not meet at all: this is the period generally designated as the Age of Absolutism. Finally, during the French Revolution, no fewer than six distinct national representative bodies succeeded each other in the space of just eleven years, under conditions that mixed grand hopes with bloody chaos. The last, and most durable of these bodies was the toothless, rubber-stamp parliament of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Consulate. Overall, faced with such a record, it is fair to ask the question: were the French simply unrepresentable? The record is so unbalanced and varied that few historians have ever attempted to generalize about the entire period 1500 to 1800. We have countless monographs on the Estates General, on absolutism, on the French Revolution, but very few attempts to connect them. However, in recent years there has been some exciting new work published on the nature of representation and government in France, especially in the French Revolutionary period, and its appearance has given me the courage to attempt some overall generalizations. In particular, I will draw on the work of François Furet,

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D av i d A . B e l l

Keith Michael Baker, Sarah Hanley, Sarah Maza, and Paul Friedland, as well as some of my ongoing research.1 In order to cover this entire period in a short paper, I need to be schematic, and introduce two distinctions between different ways of conceptualizing the process of representation itself. The first, which I draw largely from Friedland’s work, is between what can be called metaphorical embodiment, on one hand, and liberal delegation, on the other.2 Metaphorical embodiment is essentially a medieval Catholic way of conceptualizing representation, and is familiar to us from the works of historians such as Ernst Kantorowicz and Ralph Giesey.3 It posits the existence of a spiritual unity within a kingdom prior to, and independent of, any process of representation. The kingdom, in fact, is seen as a corpus mysticum—a mystical body. This body can, however, be made visible, made flesh, embodied, in particular persons, institutions, and ceremonies. The process is similar to, and based on, what takes place in the ceremony of the Eucharist. What is particularly important to remember is that even in cases where the kingdom is held to take visible shape in an Assembly, there is no room in such a body for distinct, opposing parties, for recognized majority and minority opinions, or for any sort of adversarial process of debate. There can be deliberations, of course, but these deliberations must, in theory, be directed toward discovering and making clear the preexisting unity of will. Representatives must act as the passive vessels of the section of the larger body politic that they represent, remaining completely obedient to whatever instructions they have received from it.4 In opposition to this concept of representation, we can place the modern one of liberal delegation. In this scheme, there is no preexisting spiritual unity, no corpus mysticum, only a collection of autonomous individuals bound together—but also, possibly, divided— by particular interests and ideas. This large mass of individuals chooses a smaller number of individuals to stand in for them in a deliberative assembly. The representatives are not called upon to discover unity, but to manufacture it through a process of rational, and quite possibly adversarial deliberation, involving compromise, trade-off and the acceptance of the majority will by the minority. The nature of the process implies that the representatives, far from acting as passive vessels of their electors, must be allowed to behave as free, rational actors, loyal only to their own conception of the electorate’s higher interests. Now it may seem here as if I am positing a simple distinction between a “premodern,” religiously based concept and a modern, familiar, democratic one. But I am not, and I want to resist any notion of a simple Whig progression from one to the other. Because in fact,

T h e U n r e p r e s e n ta b l e F r e n c h ?

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it is very easy for these two concepts to coexist in a single political system. Indeed, they do in ours even today. In an important sense, heads of state today, whether monarchs or presidents, metaphorically embody their nations, even if this representation is now held to be more purely symbolic than literal, and even if it is not accompanied by the same degree of reverential ceremony that it once was (although a great amount of this ceremony survives in some nations, notably Great Britain). In addition to this distinction, there is another, simpler one between what I will call active and passive forms of representation. In the first of these, a person or a body is not only held to have the ability to express the will of the kingdom, or nation, but also the ability to act on it. In the second, they are limited to expressing it to an all-powerful executive authority that can then act upon it, or not, as it sees fit.5 Again, while this second, passive model may seem wholly archaic to us, it is not. It is still present in states with parliamentary systems of government; however, an ironic crisscross has taken place. Once assemblies were given this passive, disempowered role, to the profit of a powerful executive. Now, in most European states (although not the United States), it is the monarch or president, who, reduced to playing an almost purely ceremonial role, functions as a passive representative of his or her state, and who can even express criticisms only muted to below a whisper. The two distinctions I have sketched out were not present in the French polity at the end of the Middle Ages. Both of them, in fact, were invented in the period I am surveying. The notion of passive, as opposed to active representation was an invention of what we now refer to as royal absolutism. As for the notion of liberal delegation, as opposed to metaphorical embodiment, it was a product of the movement of ideas we now refer to as the Enlightenment. Though one might expect that the French Revolution would have seen the triumph of a modern, liberal active model of representation, this was not so. The Revolution was hugely messy and indecisive in this regard, and for this reason it left a baleful legacy that contributed greatly to the political instability of the following two centuries of French history. So let me now begin my survey. At the start of the period I am covering, the concept of representation that prevailed in France was still one of metaphorical embodiment, and it was active, not passive. There was no single person, institution, or ceremony that was considered the embodiment of the kingdom of France. The kingdom could be made visible in different ways, depending on the circumstances. But there was always one common factor: the king, who was the metaphorical head of the body politic, of the corpus mysticum. There were any number of

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ceremonies that made this position visible, including those of the coronation and royal funeral; the “lit de justice,” or bed of justice, in which the king presided over a sovereign court (parlement); royal entry ceremonies into towns, and so on.6 However, the single most important and most complete form of representation involved not just the king, but also the representative assembly known as the Estates General. When the king convened them, it was as if not merely the head of the body politic, but the entire body had become physically present. When standing together, king and Estates could take actions not allowed to the king himself, such as introducing new forms of taxation. We can see the extent to which the deputies were considered to be the embodiment of their part of the body politic from an interesting linguistic confusion: when one spoke of “The Third Estate,” for instance—le tiers état—the words could designate either the entire mass of commoners in the kingdom, or simply the deputies who represented them in the Estates General.7 I should also mention here that the division between the three estates was, as Sarah Maza has emphasized, not seen as anything like a modern class division. The estates were held to be different, but functionally complementary pieces of a larger whole, in the same way that different limbs and organs were functionally complementary pieces of a single body. There was the estate that prayed, the estate that fought, and the estate that toiled.8 The system was conceptually coherent, elegant, and powerful. But it was deeply tied to Catholic notions of transubstantiation, and of the religiously unified corpus mysticum, and for this reason it could not survive the shattering of French religious unity that occurred during the Reformation. Lutheran ideas began to infiltrate into France in the 1520s, but the real shift came with Jean Calvin, particularly after the death of King Henri II in 1559. Over the next forty years, Calvinists faced with virulent persecution by the monarchy, in an attempt to defend and justify their position in the kingdom, were forced to invent new political theories that held up the authority of the nation—of which they formed a large part, at the time—over the king. In particular, François Hotman attempted to trace the institution of the Estates General back to the primitive assemblies of the Frankish people who had allegedly elected their chiefs—the forerunners of French kings.9 Meanwhile, when the possibility of a Protestant succession to the throne arose, a powerful Catholic party found itself forced to invent political theories that held up the superiority of the larger community of Catholics to the French nation, and to its king. As we know from Quentin Skinner and many others, these developments were crucial catalysts for the development of modern liberal, democratic politics.10


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For the French crown, however, the developments were potentially fatal, and in the last decades of the sixteenth century, a powerful proroyal party known as the politiques began to formulate its own new political theories and practices in response. This was the beginning of what we refer to as absolutism. In particular, the politiques radically reformulated notions of how the king was supposed to represent the body politic of the kingdom. Instead of seeing the king as a figure who could only enter into the plenitude of his representation through various constitutional ceremonies, the first and foremost of which was the convocation of the Estates General, they began to claim that the entire representative function inhered in the king’s own, physical body. In this view, ceremonies such as the royal funeral and coronation became almost wholly symbolic, for the king entered into full possession of his powers immediately upon the death of his predecessor. And he himself could stand in for the entire body politic, not merely the head. These theories were put into practice dramatically in the year 1610, when King Henri IV was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic. Hardly had his body turned cold, and even before any funeral ceremony or coronation took place, his son, Louis XIII, though still a child, presided over a lit de justice ceremony in the parlement of Paris as if already in full possession of his powers—ironically, so as to designate his own mother as Regent.11 Four years later, in the midst of a virtual civil war, his mother convened the Estates General, but it was for the last time in 175 years. As Louis’s own son, Louis XIV, would later put it, “the nation . . . resides in its entirety in the person of the king.”12 In Paul Friedland’s words, if such a simple, one-to-one correspondence is held to exist, there is no need for any form of representation other than the king himself.13 Although this representation continued to be seen as a metaphorical embodiment, and an active one at that, it had been radically redefined. The monarchy was not, however, the only important significant form of national representation present in France between 1615 and 1789. In the absence of the Estates, another institution achieved new prominence. This was the body of the parlements, or sovereign courts, whose number varied from ten to as many as fourteen during this period, with the most important by far being the Parlement of Paris. These were law courts, but they also had considerable administrative responsibilities within their jurisdictions. Furthermore, no royal law could enter into effect until the appropriate parlement had literally registered that law in its books. In theory, the parlements had no right to refuse registration. However, they did have the right to “remonstrate” with the king beforehand—to urge him to change his mind. And on many occasions

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between 1615 and 1789, the parlements made contentious use of this right to obstruct royal legislation, block royal initiatives, and unofficially insert themselves into the legislative process. Because of this contentiousness, the parlements have often been depicted as a sort of institutional opposition to the French monarchy, but this notion is mistaken. The parlements were staffed by exactly the same learned jurists who had made up the politique party during the wars of religion. Their interests were intimately tied to the monarchy, as they understood it. They were, in fact, its institutional technicians par excellence. They owned their offices as forms of property, and while this fact gave them a degree of independence from the crown in one sense, it ultimately bound them tightly to it. Without the crown’s guarantee of the structure of the judiciary, they would lose not only their position, but also very large investments. Sarah Hanley has neatly traced the way in which the parlements and the crown in fact collaborated on what she calls the “Family-State Compact” in the early seventeenth century.14 From very early on in the seventeenth century, the parlements considered themselves representatives of the nation, in the same traditional sense of metaphorical embodiment. Indeed, the jurists worked hard to trace the institutions back to the same assemblies of the Frankish people that earlier generations had associated with the Estates General. However, the parlements did not, at least at this stage, claim to represent the nation in the way the Estates did—as a constituent part of the body politic, made visible in their flesh. Instead, they claimed to act merely as a voice reminding the king of his previous promises and engagements, and they emphatically eschewed any active role in the formulation of legislation. In other words, the parlements introduced the distinction between active and passive forms of representation, and placed themselves into the latter category. They were to be partners and counselors of royal authority, not cosovereigns with the king in any sense. In return for this submission, they would receive nobility, wealth, and positions of power close to the newly absolute monarch. And this all did happen. We call it the rise of the nobility of the robe. For nearly 175 years, this absolutist understanding of representation, if we want to call it that, remained dominant. On one hand there was the king, who was held to embody the kingdom in his person and had authority to act in its name. On the other hand were the parlements that lacked any such ability to act, but that nonetheless claimed to represent the will of the nation in the sense of bringing its opinions submissively to the ears of the king. The system often broke down quite spectacularly, and during these moments the parlement did indeed emerge as a locus of opposition. It happened most importantly during the confused


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series of civil wars called the Fronde in the mid-seventeenth century. But for a long time, after each outbreak of contention, there was a return to peaceful cooperation and complementarity.15 Starting from the 1730s, and particularly after the 1750s, the system really began to break down. A royal government intent on enlarging its fiscal prerogatives and enforcing religious unity ran headlong into parlements intent on defending traditional fiscal privileges and on supporting the current of dissident Catholic thought known as Jansenism. As the conflicts grew steadily more acrimonious, the parlements increasingly publicized them, appealing to what was beginning to be called the “tribunal of public opinion,” and emphasizing its representative role vis-à-vis this new force. As this change occurred, some of the parlements’ defenders began to renew the old theories of the Protestant opposition, and to suggest that the parlements, as lineal descendants of the ancient Frankish assemblies, possessed the rights once claimed on behalf of the Estates General—that is to say an active role as effective co sovereign.16 The clearest statement of this position came in a 1756 pamphlet called Letters on the Lit de Justice, authored by the key Parlementaire strategist, a Jansenist barrister named LouisAdrien Le Paige.17 Meanwhile, the magistrates of the Parlements also began to defend the so-called inviolability of their own offices, and their “liberty” to act as they saw fit. As Friedland has noted, this assertion of inviolability can be seen as an early attempt to depict representatives as active, rational agents in their own right, untethered from the instructions of those they represent.18 The Parlements, however, never emerged as true parliaments, in the British sense. They never came any closer than this to a true active role in legislation, or to a concept of representation as liberal delegation. Instead, they endured a series of steadily escalating blows from the crown. It exiled the Parlement of Paris in 1753, brought it back, dissolved it altogether in 1771, brought it back in 1774 after the death of King Louis XV, and attempted to do away with all the parlements in 1788. In 1766, in the so-called session of the scourging, King Louis XV appeared before the Parlement of Paris, and asserted the absolute—and absolutist—identity of the monarch and the nation in stronger terms than ever before: “The rights and interests of the nation, which some dare to regard as a separate body from the monarch, are necessarily united with my rights and interests, and repose only in my hands.”19 In response, the supporters of the parlements, now known as the “patriots,” despaired at these courts ever being able to resist what they now criticized as royal “despotism.” Even Le Paige concluded that only a revived Estates General could

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truly represent the French nation before—and against—the king.20 With these events, the “absolutist model” of representation that I have been sketching out—the king as active embodiment of the kingdom, the parlements as passive embodiment—effectively collapsed.21 We are approaching the beginning of the French Revolution. But before we get there, we have to consider two other crucial developments in conceptions of representation that took place during the last fifteen years of the Old Regime. First, in 1775, the philosophe and effective finance minister Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot published a plan for a new system of national representation under the title of Memorandum on the Municipalities. It was a revolutionary document, for it broke almost entirely with the concepts of metaphorical embodiment that had prevailed in France since the Middle Ages. Turgot did not start out with a corpus mysticum divided into limbs and organs but retaining its spiritual unity. He started with individuals, who would participate in elections, with their role weighted in accordance to the wealth they possessed. A person in the countryside with an annual income of 300 French pounds would effectively have only half a vote compared with someone with an income of 600 French pounds. The system was complicated, with a pyramid of elected assemblies, and a decided bias for country dwellers over city dwellers. Its details need not concern us here. The point is simply that it did not posit a preexisting unity, nor did it shackle elected representatives to the explicit instructions of its electors. Rather, it treated them as rational, free agents, whose deliberations would produce a rational consensus.22 There was one other important point, however. Turgot’s proposed pyramid of assemblies would not itself possess any real power. Its aim, Turgot claimed, was “to establish a chain by which the most remote places might communicate with Your Majesty.”23 That is to say, it remained a fundamentally consultative, passive system of representation. It did not represent so much a break with absolutism as an enlightened reworking of it. Turgot’s plan was never implemented, but it was followed, in 1778, by a plan devised by his effective successor as minister, Jacques Necker, for a series of Provincial Assemblies. This was not intended as a representative system on the national level, and it was not even designed to cover the entire kingdom, but only those areas that lacked their own provincial Estates. It was much less of a departure from the older model of metaphorical embodiment than Turgot’s system, for, the assemblies were to retain the traditional organization into estates. However, in a crucial innovation, the delegation of the Third Estate was to be doubled in size, and the three estates were to vote in


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common, giving the Third effective control. This change might seem a minor alteration, a simple acknowledgment of the growing wealth and influence of commoners in the kingdom, as well as their vast numbers. But it was not minor at all. Simply by starting with numbers and wealth, rather than with social function—praying, fighting, laboring—Necker broke decisively with a system that still considered elective chambers as embodiments of the different limbs and organs of a body politic. And, unlike Turgot’s complex and never-realized scheme, two Provincial Assemblies actually came into being in 1778, and several more just before the Revolution.24 If I were offering up a Whig history of representation in France, I would say that the country was, at this point, moving inexorably toward a modern parliamentary system, grounded in the principle of liberal delegation. But I am not, and it was not. Even as these developments were taking place, a great Enlightenment thinker was condemning the very idea of liberal delegation in the single most influential work of political theory of the century. I am speaking, of course, about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his Social Contract. The influence of this book was famously minimized by the literary historian Daniel Mornet, but more recently has been again recognized as fundamental.25 In its pages, Rousseau thundered against the very idea of a liberal representative system. How, he asked, can a people possibly entrust its fate to representatives whom it allows to act freely? And he offered up as an example the English. As he wrote in Book III of The Social Contract: “The English people thinks itself free. It is absolutely mistaken. It is only free during the election of members of Parliament. As soon as they are elected, it is enslaved, it is nothing.”26 Rousseau insisted that freedom was only compatible with something closer to direct democracy, and he tried to devise guidelines for the construction of states in which free citizens, convening to govern themselves, would naturally be led to discover and express not simply the sum of their particular wills, but a so-called general will that rose above them, and coincided with what pure reason would choose as the best path for them to follow. The parallels are in fact striking between this transcendent general will, and the transcendent unity of the corpus mysticum as described by its medieval theorists. In short, when the French state went bankrupt and collapsed in the years 1787 to 1789, there was no apparent system of representation to which they could turn. There was the “absolutist” model in which the nation was embodied in the physical person of the king. There was the preabsolutist model of the nation embodied in the king and the Estates, which the parlements were attempting to revive. There were

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the newer notions of liberal delegation devised by Turgot and Necker. There were the influential critiques of these notions by Rousseau. And of course, there were the examples of systems of liberal delegation at work outside of France, especially in the United States and Britain. It was in this state of confusion that, in 1789, to respond to fiscal crisis and political paralysis, King Louis XVI convoked the Estates General for the first time in 175 years. But the decision immediately led to a crisis when the Parlement of Paris, acting in its judicial capacity, declared that the Estates would follow the model of 1614, which is to say that there would be three chambers, one from each estate, with equal numbers of members, and each chamber voting separately. Dale Van Kley has persuasively argued that what historians once interpreted as a simple, selfish defense of noble privilege was in fact something far more complicated. The parlement, fresh from the last and most bruising of its battles with the crown, genuinely feared that if the Estates followed the model of the newer Provincial Assemblies, where the Third Estate was doubled and the members voted in common, the crown might suborn the commoners, and use their votes to put in place a far more despotic regime.27 But whereas in previous eighteenth-century political crises a broad public opinion had arisen in print to support the parlements, this time it had other options. The result was a vast movement of critique and condemnation, expressed most fully and eloquently by Emmanuel Sieyès’s famous pamphlet What is the Third Estate. It demanded the doubling of the Third and voting by head, a move which Sieyès justified in terms derived in part from Turgot. It also attacked the so-called mandat impératif, or binding mandate, that forced deputies to act in explicit accordance with the written instructions of their electors.28 We know what followed, of course. The Third was doubled, but King Louis XVI insisted on voting by chamber, which vitiated the effect of the reform. When the Estates convened in the spring of 1789, after elections in which an unprecedented number of the French took part, they immediately deadlocked over the issue of voting. And then, the deadlock was dramatically broken when a Third Estate, led by Sieyès and Mirabeau, declared itself a National Assembly, defied the king, pledged not to separate until it had devised a new constitution for France, and attracted enough support from the other two estates to confront royal resistance, and establish itself as a new ruling body. When the king had second thoughts, and threatened military action, the people of Paris intervened and the Bastille fell. The Assembly also declared itself freed from the mandat impératif. Now, each deputy was held to be bound only by his duty to the Assembly itself, and to the nation that it collectively represented.29


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But despite this shift, the question of representation was far from resolved. The new Assembly spent two years devising a new constitution, according to the principle of liberal delegation. In it, the king would be demoted to the position of chief executive, to rule in partnership with a new unicameral Legislature, elected in constituencies across the country by so-called active citizens—adult men with sufficient property. The new system—which bore some obvious similarities to the forms of representation practiced in Britain and the United States—officially took effect in the late summer of 1791. But from the very start, it was deeply contested. Indeed, its legitimacy was never accepted by large numbers of the French. On the right, a growing body of counterrevolutionaries believed that the new constitution unduly restricted the rights—and representative function—of the king, and the traditional function of the nobility (which the Assembly officially had abolished in 1790). Those making such charges frequently had recourse to the language of metaphorical embodiment: “Just as a body that is deprived of [a head] becomes a cadaver, so the Third [Estate] without the nobility is no longer the people, & the state then suffers a political death”30 Louis XVI himself not only shared these opinions, but opposed them so bitterly that he had tried to flee the country the previous June. On the left, radicals were now demanding the abolition of the monarchy. In the city of Paris, the popular movement which had first coalesced in July, 1789 had now become an organized movement, which practiced a form of direct democracy within the so-called Sections of the municipality. Its members, too, barely accepted the new regime. These hugely combustible tensions could not be contained, especially after France went to war with Austria and Prussia in the spring of 1792. In less than a year, the explosion occurred: the so-called sans-culottes and allies from around the country stormed the royal palace of the Tuileries. The king fled to the safety of the Assembly, which soon dissolved both itself and the monarchy, and declared France a Republic. In the late summer of 1792, elections were again held, this time with universal male adult suffrage, to elect yet another deliberative body: a National Convention charged with writing yet another constitution. In the winter of 1792–93 this body put Louis XVI on trial, and condemned him to death. The new constitution was duly produced, and it too embraced the principle of liberal delegation. However, it never took effect. By the late spring of 1793, the French Revolution was facing a daunting array of dangers: a war against a large European coalition that seemed poised to march on Paris; revolts across the country from revolutionaries and

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counterrevolutionaries alike; internal dissension that resulted in the Sections surrounding the Convention with artillery and forcing the purging of the so-called Girondin faction. This moment of maximum peril was not the time for more elections and political experimentation. Instead, the Convention itself ruled. It did so in part through the surviving ministries, but increasingly relied on its own members sent throughout the country as “representatives on mission,” and on a central coordinating authority within: the Committee of Public Safety. Both the Committee, and the Convention itself, were dominated by members of the so-called Jacobin Club, an extra-parliamentary political association with branches throughout the Republic. The position of the Jacobins on representation was ambiguous. Fundamentally, as Friedland argues, they saw liberal delegation as the only long-term way to govern a nation of twenty-eight million people in a manner consonant with republican principles.31 However, at the helm of the society, Maximilien Robespierre was willing to make common cause with the sans-culottes of the Paris Sections, and even, for a time, with the allied party of extreme radicals known as the enragés, who denounced all concepts of representation in the name of direct democracy. To quote the spokesman of the enragés, Jacques Roux: “The people remember that it has already been betrayed two times by two legislatures. It is now time that the sans-culottes, who have shattered the scepter of the tyrants, bring down all manner of tyrannies.”32 Robespierre tacitly encouraged the sans-culottes to impose their will on the Convention, and, in a famous speech, he explicitly distinguished between constitutional government, which should have civil liberty as its principal goal, and revolutionary government, which might override civil liberty in the name of public safety.33 In this sense, the Jacobins stood with the left-wing critics of liberal delegation, and in many ways demonstrated a greater affinity with its counterrevolutionary critics, than with the liberals who had attempted to establish a representative democracy.34 The visual iconography promoted by the Jacobins, which Antoine de Baecque and Lynn Hunt have analyzed, provides further evidence for this move by the Left away from liberal delegation, and back toward something more akin to metaphorical embodiment. In this iconography, one of the dominant figures is Hercules, or the Colossus: a massive sans-culotte, often portrayed swinging a club. The principal symbol of counterrevolutionary evil, meanwhile, is the Hydra. As the contemporary captions and commentary suggest, the first of these was meant to suggest not merely the coming together of the French people into a single figure of strength, but their utter fusion, to the


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point of erasure of any individual identity. The Hydra, meanwhile, clearly symbolized the revolutionary fear of division, of multiplicity of opinions, of parties and factions, of the severing of the body politic.35 Arguably, the Jacobins preferred to see the Convention itself as a metaphorical embodiment of the French people, rather than as a deliberative body of representatives—at least for the period needed to establish the Revolution. In July of 1794, Robespierre and the Jacobins were toppled by a coup within the Convention. The dissolution of the Committee of Public Safety soon followed, and in 1795 the rump of the Convention devised yet another constitution, which, this time, actually took effect. This is where most historians of the Revolution, including Furet and Friedland, end their stories. But the twists and turns of forms of representation continued for the remaining five years of the century, and it is worth briefly summarizing them. The Constitution of 1795 remained loyal to the principle of liberal delegation, while again restricting the electorate through the use of property qualifications, and establishing a bicameral legislature. It was threatened by the last insurrections of the sans-culottes, but these were brutally suppressed. In theory, it would seem as if the last challenges to supposedly “modern” ideas of representation disappeared with them, but this was not the case. As is well known, the new regime, generally known as the “Directory” after its five-man executive, was extraordinarily unstable. After barely surviving a royalist insurrection in 1795, it underwent three successive coups before succumbing to a fourth—that of Bonaparte in 1799. In the process, it quickly lost legitimacy in the eyes of most of the population. As the Directory was losing legitimacy, however, another institution was gaining it. It was an institution which, under the old regime, had never possessed any sort of real political autonomy, but which developed it quickly during the Revolution. I am speaking of the Army.36 In August of 1793, the Convention had declared the levée en masse—a general rising of the entire French population. Immediately afterwards it formally requisitioned all men between the ages of 18 and 25 for service in the army. In 1798, the so-called Loi Jourdan set up, for the first time in European history, a comprehensive and organized system of conscription, in which every adult male was expected to do military service. These laws, besides greatly increasing the size of the French armed forces and contributing significantly to France’s military victories, had the crucial effect of establishing, for the first time, a bond of identification between the army and the nation as a whole. Whereas the revolutionaries had denounced the professional army of the old regime,

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led by aristocrats and staffed in part by mercenaries, as the servant of royal despotism, they hailed the new army of 1793–94 as an extension of the nation itself. This sense of identification was only heightened by the dramatic victories of 1794, and then of 1796–97, which established French rule in Belgium, the Rhineland, and northern Italy. Generals became far more popular figures than any Paris politicians, and thought so little of the government under which they served that they regularly defied its orders, acting on their own initiative to negotiate treaties and even to set up satellite governments in Italy—as both Generals Bonaparte and Championnet did. Bonaparte, in particular, quickly began to represent the army, and himself, in print, as “the savior of the Republic.” A newspaper he controlled reported that during a Bastille Day march through Milan in 1797, a corporal came up to him and declared: “General, you have saved France. . . . [Now] save the Republic.”37 The incident was probably stage-managed, but the careful research of Jean-Paul Bertaud makes clear that the rank-and-file did in fact largely share this opinion. Consider one letter that Bertaud quotes, from a soldier in Italy to the Directory: “Reflect on the fact that we are your first children, and that you only exist thanks to us.” Or this address from the division of Liège, in 1798: “We have purchased the Republic through six years of exhaustion, privation and misery; we have cemented it with our blood.”38 In these texts, we see an echo of the principal of metaphorical embodiment, except that now the embodiment of the nation is not the king, but the armed forces. Because of their sacrifices, and superior dedication and virtue, they claim to be more representative of the nation than anyone else. This notion is at the heart of militarism, a phenomenon which had been entirely absent from France before 1789, but which quickly arose in the context of the revolutionary wars.39 In 1799, Napoleon put the Directory out of its misery with his coup of the 18th Brumaire. He too, in theory, remained loyal to the principle of liberal delegation in theory in designing his own constitution. He too had an elected legislature, tricameral this time, with its members being selected by constituencies and allowed the freedom to deliberate and legislate as they saw fit. But, in fact, the story of his regime was, again, more complicated. To begin with, despite this constitutional system, Napoleon had constant recourse to a species of direct democracy: namely plebiscites. In many cases, he won these legitimately, but nonetheless cheated, so as to make the results look even more impressive.40 This device testified to a Rousseauesque suspicion of representation, just as it does today in California and other American states that make use of direct ballot


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initiatives. Second, in his new legislature, Napoleon reached back to the old regime to make use of a distinction between active and passive modes of representation. One of its chambers, called the Tribunate, could discuss government bills but not vote on them. Another, the Legislative Body could vote on bills but not discuss them. With the Tribunate, we see a clear return to the passive mode we saw at work in the parlements, and also in Turgot’s Memorandum. In other words, with Napoleon, this side of absolutism made a reappearance, particularly since, in practice, debates in the Tribunate constituted the only real restraint on executive power, albeit a weak one (in fact, Napoleon later abolished it).41 And finally, there is the figure of Napoleon himself. He put himself forward as the representative of the French people in no less than three distinct ways. Most literally, he raised himself in 1804 to the position of “Emperor of the French”—not, let it be noted, of France—justifying this change through a plebiscite, and thus, democratic choice. Second, once this choice had taken place, he had himself crowned emperor by the pope in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, reenacting not the ancient ceremony of the royal sacre, but the still more ancient ceremony of the coronation of Charlemagne. With this attempt to summon up the shades of a thousand-year old French monarchy, there was a clear return to the principle of metaphorical embodiment that had served his royal predecessors. And finally, Napoleon also conserved the alternate principle of metaphorical embodiment that had brought him to power in the first place, the militaristic one that saw the nation incarnated not in a man, but in the army. For as we all know, Napoleon did not hang up his epaulettes upon becoming consul, or emperor. He continued to wear military uniform, and remained in personal command of his armies, leading them in Germany, Austria, Spain, Poland, and, fatally in Russia. As François Furet has remarked, Napoleon himself knew that the battle of Marengo in 1800, far more than the coup of Brumaire, was the true coronation of his power and his regime. To quote Furet: “This was a coronation which no longer came by divine right, since it was the result of the most one-sided contract that a nation had ever made with its leader, who was forced into a commitment never to be beaten.”42 A few words of conclusion: In this paper, I have tried to show that the history of national political representation in France cannot be forced into any sort of constraining Whiggish framework. Even the French Revolution did not mark the triumph of a “modern” system of liberal representation over the debris of royal absolutism. In fact, as I have shown, the Revolution, particularly in its radical stage, was noted as much for anxious opposition to liberal representation, as by support

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for it. In this opposition, counterrevolutionaries and Jacobins stood together on one side, and the weak, liberal centrists on the other. Throughout the Revolutionary period, as before it, many different principles of representation continued to be proposed, debated, and enacted, while frequently coming into conflict. Indeed, in this period, the French were not so much unrepresentable as overrepresented, in a number of often contradictory ways. Still, as I have also tried to show, these ways of representation can be placed into rough categories, and a rough logic can be demonstrated in the way they interacted. This logic, however, does not explain why one regime followed another, or do anything so presumptuous as suggesting why the French Revolution occurred. It does, however, I hope, suggest some of the constraints that led historical actors to the choices they made, opening up some possibilities, while closing off others.

Notes 1. François Furet, Penser la Révolution Française (Paris, 1978); Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, UK, 1990); Sarah Hanley, “Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France,” French Historical Studies, 16(1) (Spring, 1989), pp. 4–27; Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, 2002). 2. Friedland refers to these as “re-presentation” and “representation,” and the pairing has a certain concise eloquences, but for the purposes of this paper I prefer to use clearer, if also more cumbersome terminology. See Political Actors, passim, but particularly pp. 29–51. 3. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1981); Ralph E. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva, 1960). 4. See Friedland, Political Actors, pp. 29–51, and Baker, Inventing, pp. 224–51. 5. See Baker, Inventing, pp. 120–3. 6. See, in addition to Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony, Sarah Hanley, The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual and Discourse (Princeton, 1983); Richard A. Jackson, Vive le Roi! A History of the French Coronation from Charles V to Charles X (Chapel Hill, 1984); Lawrence M. Bryant, The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual and Art in the Renaissance (Geneva, 1986).


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7. See Friedland, Political Actors, pp. 29–51, and Ralph Giesey, “The King Imagined,” in The Political Culture of the Old Regime, ed. Keith Michael Baker (Oxford, 1987), pp. 41–59. On the Estates General, see J. Russell Major, Representative Government in Early Modern France (New Haven, CT, 1980). 8. Maza, Myth, pp. 14–21, and David A. Bell, “Class, Consciousness, and the Fall of the Bourgeois Revolution,” Critical Review, 16(2–3) (2004), pp. 323–51. 9. François Hotman, Francogallia, ed. Ralph Giesey, trans. J.M. Salmon (Cambridge, UK, 1972). 10. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK, 1978). 11. These events are ably discussed in Giesey, “The King Imagined,” esp. pp. 48–9. 12. Quoted in Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le Roi-Machine: Spectacle et Politique au Temps de Louis XIV (Paris, 1981), p. 13. 13. Friedland, Political Actors, p. 52. 14. See Hanley, “Engendering the State”; also David A. Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (New York, 1994), pp. 21–40. 15. See Albert N. Hamscher, The Parlement of Paris after the Fronde, 1653–1673 (Pittsburgh, 1976); William Doyle, “The Parlements,” in Political Culture, ed. Baker, pp. 157–68 (New York, 1987–94). 16. On this subject, see above all Dale Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unravelling of the Ancien Régime, 1750–1770 (Princeton, 1984), pp. 166–225; also Baker, Inventing, pp. 224–51; Bell, Lawyers and Citizens, pp. 67–128. 17. [Louis-Adrien Le Paige], Lettre sur les lits de justice (n.p., 1756). 18. Friedland, Political Actors, pp. 59–60. 19. “The Session of the Scourging,” in The Old Regime and the French Revolution ed. Keith Michael Baker (Chicago, 1987), p. 49. 20. Van Kley, Damiens, pp. 192–3, Bell, Lawyers, pp. 148–49. 21. On these events, see also the useful surveys of Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution: A Study in the History of Libertarianism, France, 1770–1774 (Baton Rouge, 1985); Bailey Stone, The French Parlements and the Crisis of the Old Regime (Chapel Hill, 1986). 22. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, “Mémoire sur les Municipalités,” in Œuvres de Turgot, ed. Gustave Schelle, 5 vols. (Paris, 1913–23), vol I, pp. 568–628. 23. Quoted in Friedland, Political Actors, p. 69. 24. See P.M. Jones, Reform and Revolution in France: The Politics of Transition, 1774–1791 (Cambridge, UK, 1995), pp. 35–49. 25. Daniel Mornet, “L’enseignement des Bibliothèques Privées (1750–1780),” Revue d’histoire Littéraire de la France, vol. 17 (1910): 449–96; R.A. Leigh, Unsolved Problems in the Bibliography of Jean Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge, UK, 1990), pp. 76–77.

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D av i d A . B e l l 26. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 430 (Du Contrat Social, Book III, chapter XV). 27. Dale Van Kley, “The Estates General as Ecumenical Council: The Constitutionalism of Corporate Consensus and the Parlement’s Ruling of September 25, 1788,” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 61, no. 1 (1989): 1–52. 28. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etat? (Paris, 1789). 29. On the end of the mandat impératif, see Friedland, Political Actors, pp. 142–46. 30. Quoted in ibid., p. 235. 31. See ibid., pp. 228–57. 32. Quoted in ibid., p. 289. 33. Maximilien Robespierre, “Sur les Principes du Gouvernement Révolutionnaire,” in Discours, ed. Marc Bouloiseau (Paris, 1965), pp. 187–206. 34. See, however, the forthcoming work of David Woodworth on this subject, which will challenge this interpretation. 35. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984), pp. 94–113; Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–1800, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, 1993), pp. 309–20; Friedland, Political Actors, pp. 237–39. 36. On the army, see above all Jean-Paul Bertaud, La Révolution Armée: Les Soldats-Citoyens et la Révolution Française (Paris, 1979). 37. Quoted in ibid., p. 326. 38. Quoted in ibid., pp. 329, 332. 39. On this subject, see my forthcoming book, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of War as We Know It (Boston, 2007). 40. See Isser Woloch, Napoleon and his Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship (New York, 2001), pp. 94–96. 41. Ibid., pp. 85–89. 42. François Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford, 1992), p. 218. See also Irene Collins, Napoleon and His Parliaments 1800–1815 (New York, 1979).

Select Bibliography Baker, Keith Michael. Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Friedland, Paul. Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). J. Major, Russell. Representative Government in Early Modern France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

Chapter 5

Noble C orporations and Provincial Diets in the E cclesiastical Principalities of the Holy Roman E mpire ca. 1648–1802 Ronald G. Asch

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esearch on the history of the Estates and diets of the various German principalities and dominions in the early modern period has been less extensive during the last two decades than in the more distant past.1 The general decline of traditional constitutional history, noticeable even in England, has been even more pronounced in Germany, with the exception perhaps of the history of the Holy Roman Empire and its institutions that is flourishing now more than ever.2 This is much less true for research on the development of territorial Estates, which has become almost a neglected topic. There are, however, signs for a certain revival, as diets and provincial parliaments are no longer seen exclusively as legislative institutions with legally defined powers but are viewed in the wider context of early modern political culture in general. The parliamentary rituals and procedures, and the structures of political communication that governed the meeting of the Estates, as much as other forms of interaction between ruler and subjects are now more closely studied than in the past.3 Historians increasingly recognize that even diets that had neither the

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wish nor the power to oppose the ruling prince openly could be important as places where the overall structure of order and authority found its symbolic expression, or where it was constantly reenacted by time-honored rituals. Moreover, regional patriotism has become an important topic—patriotism not in the sense of some romantic attachment to soil and history but rather as a commitment to a real or imagined ancient constitution and the privileges and liberties of the regional elite. In fact, Robert v. Friedeburg has shown in his research on the tradition of regional patriotism, that Estates in Germany were quite capable of deploying the most up-to-date political arguments in the seventeenth century when they felt the need to do so. Their resistance theories were clearly as sophisticated as anything one might find in western Europe, but admittedly much more legalistic in their overall approach as the constitutional framework of the Holy Roman Empire offered territorial Estates a large scope for articulating their grievances in appeals to the Law Courts of the Empire, the Imperial Aulic Council in Vienna and the Chamber Court in Speyer.4 Nevertheless many historians still assume that most German provincial Estates, after their heyday in the sixteenth century quickly lost their power and influence after the Thirty Years’ War, when princely absolutism triumphed over ancient liberties.5 This is a judgment that may be plausible enough at first glance if we look primarily at the larger and more powerful secular principalities, but which is much less convincing when we take into account developments in areas such as Mecklenburg or Württemberg or the many ecclesiastical principalities.6 But even in Prince Electorates such as Saxony and Hanover, the Estates continued to play an important part in administration and politics in the eighteenth century, where the ruler was either a permanent absentee, as in the Hanoverian case after 1714, or espoused a religion which most of his subjects rejected, as in Saxony where the Wettin dynasty became Catholic after 1697 in order to gain the Polish crown losing thereby the unqualified support of the staunchly Lutheran Estates.7 Moreover, the very notion of absolutism has become controversial.8 Even comparatively strong rulers such as the Hohenzollern in Brandenburg and Prussia were forced to seek a compromise with the traditional noble elite and were generally careful not to attack their local power—as opposed to their claims to intervene in matters of “high politics”—directly. In the Habsburg monarchy, the various provincial diets may no longer have tried to oppose the emperor’s authority openly as they had done in 1618 and in the preceding decades, but their importance as a focus of financial administration as

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much as a point of contact between monarch and the regional elite remained undiminished at least until the mid- eighteenth century.9 We have recently become more aware of the fact that structures of political authority do not simply exist once they have been established, but must be reproduced daily in the actions of both ruler and subjects, otherwise they collapse or become obsolete.10 For this process of reenacting established patterns of power while at the same time constantly renegotiating the specific conditions under which authority could be exercised, the Estates and their committees remained important in many parts of the Holy Roman Empire well into the eighteenth century. Even in those principalities where the diets no longer met, noble corporations often survived at the local level and preserved the collective memory of ancient privileges and liberties. In times of crisis, or in the late eighteenth century when fiscal and legal reforms made the cooperation of representative institutions of some sort highly desirable, even in the eyes of the central administration, older corporations could be revived within a short time. Some historians have spoken of this period as a phase in which the influence, and sometimes the very existence of the Estates, became concealed or latent (Latenzphase) after 1648 without, however, ever entirely disappearing. This would explain the renaissance of diets and Estates that some historians assume to have taken place at the very end of the eighteenth century.11 What is clear in any case is the fact that German Estates, or rather those chambers or colleges of the provincial assemblies that comprised noble landowners, had a great importance for the social identity of the nobility, a fact that was noted at the time by foreign observers as much as by German lawyers.12 Diets were not just places where political decisions were taken; they were also centers of sociability and, like the eighteenth-century British House of Commons, they could serve as a sort of superior and very exclusive club for the social elite. Moreover, in Germany a family claiming noble status was only truly noble when it had been admitted to the meetings of the regional or local corporation of noblemen; a mere title of nobility without membership in such a corporation was worth comparatively little even if it was combined with wealth and landownership. Thus, even diets and Estates, which had lost much of their direct political influence, survived because their existence was indispensable for the nobility to defend their social status and prestige. With important regional differences, there was a general tendency after the mid-seventeenth century to completely exclude newcomers from the Estates either or at least from the more prestigious places of honor and influence in the assemblies and their committees.

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In electoral Saxony, for example, those who wanted to attend the Diet of the Electorate as opposed to those who merely elected delegates to the assembly of the Estates had to prove that they were descended from a long line of noble ancestors. In 1700 the Prince Elector enacted a law that required every noble member of the diet to demonstrate that he had sixteen noble ancestors, both female and male, in the generation of his great-great-grandparents, and these regulations were by and large strictly enforced in the eighteenth century.13 As happened in Saxony, control of membership in the noble Estates became more stringent in the late seventeenth century and to enforce norms of ancestry, the noble corporations were increasingly forced to appeal to the princes who had in some cases arrogated to themselves the right to bestow the ius incolatus (i.e., the right to attend the diet, which a natural born subject of noble birth who had inherited noble property could claim) on new candidates, as in Bohemia after 1627.14 In the eighteenth century, some rulers such as Frederick II of Prussia deliberately pursued a policy that was designed to protect the ancient nobility against the vicissitudes of the rise and fall of prices of agricultural products in their competition with wealthy newcomers who were eager to buy manors and large estates. Such attempts to prevent rich commoners from buying noble property and thereby gaining entry into the noble corporations (Ritterschaften), were, however, not always welcomed by the nobility itself as this could adversely affect the price of their own manors.15 Moreover, in some regions, the line dividing less well-to-do noble families from wealthy peasant freeholders was traditionally less than clear as, for example, in Eastern Prussia. Here the crown’s attempt to enforce its own exclusive definition of noble status was accepted only very reluctantly by the noble Estates themselves who would have preferred to keep their corporations open to a certain extent.16 * * * Such open-mindedness would have been unthinkable among the noble corporations of Germany’s numerous ecclesiastical principalities. These dominions were a paradise for the ancient nobility and a nightmare for those who mistakenly assumed that mere wealth and landedproperty gave them a right to vote in the diets. In the late eighteenth century, however, criticism of these small noble republics headed by elected princes wearing mitres instead of crowns became increasingly vociferous. In 1786, the Journal für Deutschland posed a question to its readers that had been devised by Philip Anton von Bibra, a canon


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of Fulda cathedral and president of the episcopal government in this principality: Why were the inhabitants of the ecclesiastical principalities clearly not the happiest men and women in Germany? Why was the government of these states not the most efficient and benevolent, despite the fact that the ecclesiastical dominions were among the most prosperous regions in Germany, and their rulers freely elected, so that theoretically only the best and most gifted candidates could become bishops?17 It comes not altogether as a surprise that many writers who submitted their answer to von Bibra were convinced that the way the ecclesiastical principalities were governed was far from perfect. Friedrich Carl von Moser, a Swabian lawyer and well-known author of political tracts was particularly outspoken in his criticism, and Moser, who was a strong Protestant, saw any kind of Catholic clerical influence on secular affairs in a very unfavorable light. But other authors who were Catholics and sometimes clergymen themselves often took an equally dim view of the widespread corruption and the backwardness of the ecclesiastical principalities. The extent to which the princes’ authority in the ecclesiastical dominions was limited by the power of the cathedral chapters and by the influence of the secular nobility and the Estates, in general, was seen as pernicious, because it made all attempts at real reform in whatever areas of government almost entirely futile. Moser argued, in his answer to the question von Bibra had posed, that the tendency to settle or rather fight out conflicts between the prince bishops on one hand and the chapters and Estates on the other in the imperial law courts was as preposterous as if King George III had tried to sue his American subjects in a Dutch court of law in the 1770s.18 Moser claimed that reforms were difficult in the ecclesiastical dominions because the key positions in the government and administration were held by clergymen, mostly members of the chapter, and because the other officeholders were afraid to offend the chapter, given the fact that an elected bishop favoring reforms could, after his death, easily be replaced by a man devoted to the interests of the canons.19 Nevertheless, he did not want to abolish the elective principle of government in the ecclesiastical territories altogether; rather he saw the quasi-republican or aristocratic character of these states as a chance for enlightened government, provided necessary changes were made. In future, Moser argued, the rulers in these principalities who would abandon their positions as bishops should be elected by all local noblemen who were stiftsfähig, that is, who had the necessary number of noble ancestors. Thus the prince bishoprics would officially become small aristocratic republics and the noblemen

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who had been born to bear “shield and helmet,” as Moser put it, would again appear in their “ancient German garb” as knights and liegemen instead of dressing up rather preposterously as clergymen.20 Moser’s proposal was hardly very realistic, but he was quite right in assuming that the ecclesiastical principalities were in the last resort small aristocratic republics in disguise. The Estates and noble corporations such as the cathedral chapters had therefore a special function and played a special role in the ecclesiastical principalities. They were not just the representatives of privileged social groups. They saw themselves in the case of the deans and chapters as the real owners of the state, as its Erbherren, hereditary lords,21 and the bishop whom they elected only as a mere temporary officeholder. What is more, the right to gain access to these corporations, which was reserved to limited groups within the (Catholic) German nobility and was jealously guarded, deeply influenced the entire outlook, the behavior, and the social identity of the regional nobilities that enjoyed this valuable privilege. One may find other examples where the hereditary membership of a noble corporation or the chamber/curia of a diet provided the foundation for the entire social identity of the corresponding noble group as, for example, in the case of the English peerage or the Venetian nobility. Overall, however, such cases are the exception rather than the rule. In the ecclesiastical principalities we encounter a world of complicated and jealously guarded privileges, of intricate social hierarchies, and of regional autonomy. Certainly the ecclesiastical corporations and the diets of the prince bishoprics were not the forerunners of modern parliaments, as opposed to the English House of Commons or American colonial assemblies, but perhaps they were quite typical of the sort of political participation that was the norm within the framework of the European ancien régime. * * * In many ways most prince bishoprics (the very small ones in southern Germany and in the border regions of Germany and Italy or Switzerland, such as Freising, Constance, Brixen, Chur, and Trient were a partial exception here), were institutions maintained principally for the benefit of the aristocracy or, one might say, for the outdoor relief of noble families in the early modern period. From the late Middle Ages onwards, fewer and fewer benefices could be attained by candidates who were of nonnoble origin, a stipulation that had been initiated in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries when most chapters required candidates to prove that they had


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sixteen noble ancestors, that is, that all their great-great-grandparents, both male and female were noble.22 When a young nobleman—some were very young indeed when they obtained their first benefice, sometimes, not older than ten or twelve years—was actually admitted to a chapter the income he derived from his benefice was often very considerable and he was able to procure profitable positions in the local and central administrations for kinsmen who were not clergymen themselves. Thus, enormous family fortunes could be amassed by the skillful pursuit of careers in the church. Among the German prince bishoprics that survived the Reformation and the subsequent attempts to transform theses dominions into secular principalities, the bishoprics in Franconia and along the central parts of the river Rhine and along the Mosel, such as Würzburg, Bamberg, Mainz, and Trier, as well as Worms and Speyer were dominated by canons from the corporation of free imperial knights, the Reichsritter, who were not subject to any territorial prince but only to the Emperor. The bishoprics in northwestern Germany, on the other hand, were largely under the control of the local territorial nobility.23 Hildesheim and Osnabrück were a special case among the northwestern bishoprics. As the majority of local noblemen were Protestants here, outsiders formed a greater percentage of the local chapters than usual and there were often tensions between the canons and the noble Estate in this territory.24 Minden was a different case again, for though it was ruled by Brandenburg-Prussia after 1648, it retained its cathedral chapter to which both Catholic and Protestant canons could be appointed. Finally, there were Cologne and Strasburg, where most of the canons or at least those who had the right to vote in the sessions of the chapter had to be members of the high aristocracy, that is, they had to be descendants of counts or princes of the Holy Roman Empire which limited the number of candidates very severely.25 In northwestern Germany the cathedral chapters formed themselves the first curia or chamber in the territorial Estates. Normally the other two estates were the noblemen holding manors as fiefs in the principality and the towns. In Cologne the nobility was divided into two separate colleges, one consisted of counts of the empire who held fiefs from the archbishop, although they were not his subjects, and the other, less important one, consisted of simple knights with most of them holding manors within the electoral principality. In Cologne there were eleven fiefs and noble lordships; their owners were entitled to sit in the chamber of counts, but in 1759, these eleven lordships were owned by only five families. Similarly only thirty-eight persons made up the Ritterschaft, or noble estate, with its

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227 landtagsfähige manors.26 Because the rules for gaining admission to the Estates were so strict, a number of noble corporations consisted of fewer and fewer families, although the surviving dynasties often had a growing number of sub-branches. In Franconia and Mainz the situation was different again; here the role the cathedral chapters played in government had made the participation of the secular nobility in the assemblies of the Estates more or less superfluous, Moreover, the knights preferred to organize themselves outside of the Estates to defend their autonomy and special status as the emperor’s immediate subjects, and also to avoid paying taxes. Undoubtedly there was a certain tendency in northwestern Germany as well for the chapters to assume such an important position in the day-to-day administration of the principalities that the influence of both the secular nobility and the towns was reduced. However, in Münster and other Westphalian bishoprics, the Ritterschaft did not disappear after 1648. What is more, whereas before 1648 the sessions of the Landtage, the territorial diets, had lasted only a day or two, after 1648 they started taking up to three or four or even five weeks each year. Often the Landtage met every year or at least every two or three years, as they did in the Archbishopric of Cologne.27 * * * Why did the territorial diets in the ecclesiastical principalities of northwestern Germany survive and even prosper in a period when the full diets were replaced by small commissions or ceased to meet altogether in other dominions? Certainly the elected ruler’s position was much weaker here than in Prussia or many other secular kingdoms and lordships.28 However, it was also important that the diets and, in particular, the knightly Estates were needed to approve the coats of arms and the genealogical tables submitted by new members. Only families that were members of a noble corporation where the same strict rules were observed for noble status as in the cathedral chapters themselves could present candidates for the chapters; others were excluded. This was a fact of the utmost importance. If the diets had ceased to meet, the noblemen would have lost their chance to gain access to the rich benefices that they so eagerly sought to obtain for members of their family. At least from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, legal statutes were enacted by the Estates in Münster, Hildesheim, Paderborn, and Osnabrück, which required every new member to prove that all of his sixteen great-great-grandparents were indeed noble. The process whereby the necessary genealogical table was approved was


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called Aufschwörung. It meant that two or more members of the Ritterschaft had to swear an oath that the information provided was true and that the new member was indeed a nobleman of ancient extraction.29 The Aufschwörung was a solemn occasion attended as a rule by members of the princely government and of the cathedral chapters. A similar procedure took place when somebody was elected as a new canon; in Paderborn, the new canon had to wear the habit of a monk and sleep in a building near the cathedral for six weeks. At the end of the period, he walked in solemn procession through the streets of the city, and an officeholder carried a flag with his coat of arms before him (Kappengang), so that everybody could see who the new canon was and that his status as a nobleman had been approved.30 Arrangements similar to the requirement to present sixteen noble ancestors had already existed before the seventeenth century for foreign nobles in some cases, but they were not always observed very strictly. In the seventeenth century, however, and in particular after the Thirty Years’ War, there was a widely felt need to prevent the prince bishops, who were—at least in northwestern Germany—often foreign princes or rulers who sought to limit the authority of the Estates, from filling the noble chambers of the diets with their personal clients and with social climbers and courtiers born abroad.31 Moreover, one wanted more than ever to make sure that no outsider had access to the valuable benefices that were indispensable to maintain the wealth and status of the established families. Thus, both the noble Estates in the prince bishoprics of northwestern Germany and the imperial knighthood remained noble corporations that defined their membership themselves. Whereas in monarchies such as France where social status, at least since the late sixteenth century, was in the last resort defined by the crown, older ideals of noble identity survived there among the noble groups attached to the cathedral chapters. In northwestern Germany, however, it was the fact that someone was accepted by his peers as a nobleman that was decisive for his status, not a patent granted by an emperor, king, or prince, which was, in fact, quite worthless. It was at this point that, the process of being accepted by one’s peers was no longer an informal social act but became a complicated legal procedure governed by strict and detailed rules and therefore also subject to legal claims and counterclaims. Often endless lawsuits were provoked and litigation entered into in the Imperial Aulic Council in Vienna or in Wetzlar in the Imperial Chamber Court. As has already been pointed out, other German principalities also passed statutes that limited access to the noble Estate in the diet to the ancient nobility. Elsewhere, however, newly ennobled families that were

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often not eligible to the more important dignities and positions of honor and influence rarely were entirely excluded from the sessions if they had managed to buy or inherit a landtagsfähiges Gut, that is, a manor which traditionally gave its owner the right to attend the diet.32 In Westphalia this was not so. Here even families of the so called Erbmänner, the former hereditary aldermen of the city who, in the late Middle Ages, had constituted the urban patriciate of Münster and had long ago adopted a noble life style, were excluded from the diets. This principle had been enforced from the second half of the sixteenth century. It was admittedly declared null and void in 1685 by the Imperial Chamber court and finally, after further haggling, reversed in 1714 after a law suit that lasted for more than a century; the impact, of this decision, however, was limited. Most patrician families had already become extinct by this date, and so the exclusive character of the knighthood could be preserved to the greater and everlasting glory of the Ritterschaft.33 The stringent rules governing the membership of the noble estates in northwestern Germany, and also of other noble corporations whose members were interested in obtaining a share in the ecclesiastical benefices of the great cathedral churches such as the Reichsritterschaft the imperial knighthood in Franconia or along the Rhine, deeply influenced the matrimonial habits and the mentality of the noble elite in these areas of Germany. Essentially noblemen and—women—were forced to marry members of the same very narrowly defined regional and social group. Marriages with outsiders from other parts of Germany or, even worse, from other European countries, had to be avoided because here noble status was often defined less strictly or in an entirely different way. In France, for example, most ducs et pairs would have found it quite difficult to be admitted to a German cathedral chapter. The problem was that in France the status of nobleman was primarily defined by the rank of his male ancestors; the social origins of his female ancestors were far less important. Thus it was by no means unusual in France for members of the high aristocracy to marry women who belonged to the noblesse de robe or the haute finance, and whose ancestors had been commoners.34 Such liberal not to say lax attitudes would have been unthinkable among the noble corporations of the German prince bishoprics. German noble corporations in the ecclesiastical principalities were in general very reluctant to accept proofs of noble status provided by noble Estates outside Germany. Thus, when a member of the nobility of Osnabrück, who belonged to the most prestigious local family, which in the past had always held the office of hereditary high steward


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of the bishopric (Erblanddrost), made the mistake of marrying a Dutch girl of noble stock, a Taets van Amerongen, in the early eighteenth century, he and his descendants were not admitted to the sessions of the diet for more than seventy years until the Imperial Aulic Council in Vienna finally rejected this attempt to exclude an ancient family.35 The Osnabrück law suit showed how important was to members of noble corporations in the ecclesiastical territories the pride they took in their pure descent. One of the members of the Osnabrück nobility, the imperial field marshal von Moltke, the son of a convert to Catholicism and a member of a family that held estates in Mecklenburg and Denmark, argued that should one day nonnobles or newly ennobled upstarts be admitted to the Ritterschaft, he would emigrate and sell his country house and his estates, because the shameful loss of honor the entry of such people would entail would be unbearable.36 Moltke himself was a soldier of distinction and served in the imperial army, but among the Catholic nobility of Westphalia, a military career pursued with such energy had already become slightly unusual in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.37 As a rule the eldest son married and inherited the family estate which, at this stage, was normally part of a fideicommiss, the German version of the strict settlement. However, there were also examples of eldest sons choosing or being made to choose a career in the church and leaving the task of continuing the family to a younger son.38 Nevertheless, in most cases, the younger sons became clergymen hoping to obtain a benefice in a cathedral chapter or at least in some other collegiate church. * * * Partly because the Stiftsadel, the hereditary nobility of the prince bishopric, found its natural focus to such a high degree in the meetings of the diet, in the cathedral chapter, and in the court and central administrations of the principality, the rural nobility became increasingly urbanized in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the same way in which English peers built palatial houses in London, the nobility of Münster, for example, acquired magnificent town houses in the capital of the bishopric, a development recently analyzed in great detail by Marcus Weidner. There is a certain irony in the fact that a noble elite that had in the past rejected patrician urban families as insufficiently aristocratic itself adopted now the life style and habits of an urban rentier class, at least for half of the year, in winter. Cities such as Münster where the diets were regularly held had become too important to be left to the bourgeoisie. It was essential to dominate

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the urban space by erecting extensive buildings to maintain the cultural hegemony of the nobility, and also to assert one’s family’s claim to the greatest possible share of the valuable canonries. Thus, cities such as Münster and Mainz were dominated in the eighteenth century by the town houses of the most influential noble dynasties.39 What is characteristic for all ecclesiastical principalities is the fact that the Estates, as representatives of the ruler’s subjects, in some way formed themselves part of the government of the principalities. This is true in particular for the cathedral chapter that regularly claimed a number of key positions in the civil and ecclesiastical administration and that, moreover, acted as the collective regent of the bishopric in the interim period between a ruler’s death and the installation of a successor. In some cases the chapter could even replace the bishop as ruler as, for example, in Cologne between 1702 and 1714 when the emperor had the bishop who had made the mistake of allying himself with France deposed.40 In most principalities the diets were summoned by the bishop and the chapter together or at least with the consent of the chapter.41 In many bishoprics the canons considered themselves the hereditary lords, the Erbherren of the diocese and principality. In some cases they even called themselves the “hereditary mother,” the Erbmutter of the Stift, which, in a manner of speaking, gave birth to a new bishop by electing him.42 In those bishoprics where the chapters were dominated by families from outside the principality, as in Hildesheim and Osnabrück, for example, the local noblemen understandably resented such claims. But the Estate of noblemen also frequently took part in the government of the territory. Many noblemen held high offices in the local or central administration or attended the princely court, unless the prince bishop was an absentee in which case there was no court. In fact, whereas other courts of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were to some extent points of contact and centers of political power competing with the diets and Estates, in as far as these had survived, this was decidedly not so in the ecclesiastical dominions. Admittedly there were phases when outsiders played a more prominent role at court—in Cologne in the late seventeenth century, for example—or when nobles dynasties which owned estates primarily outside of the prince bishopric in neighboring dominions gained greater prominence, but by and large an ecclesiastical ruler’s court was not a place where noblemen were domesticated nor their spirit of independence subdued.43 The ecclesiastical principalities demonstrated in the eighteenth century what government by and for the nobility and the Estates meant. They were a perfect countermodel to the “absolutism” which,


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at least in theory, dominated politics in many secular dominions. However, the hothouse atmosphere of patronage politics, where the inherited prestige of a family and its wealth were all important and talent and hard work counted for very little when a candidate tried to obtain a benefice or an office in the civil administration, were increasingly seen as incompatible with the principles of enlightened government and the new ideals of post–baroque churchmanship which gained influence in the late eighteenth century.44 In the 1780s and 1790s the calls for a reform of the established constitutional structures became stronger and more vehement. In Mainz where a number of canons supported the Catholic enlightenment, the lawyer Peter Anton Frank, submitted a number of proposals for the reform of the archiepiscopal government. For Frank, the chapter had to act as the representative of the subjects in general, as a true national or regional representative body and the Wahlkapitulation, that is, the agreement with the chapter a new bishop had to sign when elected, had to be reinterpreted as a genuine constitution.45 These proposals though widely discussed had no practical impact, but in the prince bishopric of Liège a sort of local revolution did take place in 1789. It sought on one hand to revive the ancient fourteenth-century constitution of the principality that had been gradually abrogated in the seventeenth century and tried, on the other hand, to create a more democratic representation of the bishop’s subjects. For the moment moderate reformers within the privileged elite and popular forces cooperated. A similar but far more cautious and less violent movement made its influence felt in the 1790s even in peaceful and remote Hildesheim where the peasant farmers, initially supported by a minority of enlightened canons and noblemen, demanded a voice in the territorial diet.46 The impact of such movements, however, remained limited, and their objectives became obsolete when Revolutionary France and the great European powers swept away the Holy Roman Empire itself and with it the entire fabric of ancient privileges and established corporate rights that were nowhere as all embracing and as complicated as in the ecclesiastical principalities. The history of the diets in the German ecclesiastical principalities demonstrates that assemblies of Estates offered more than just a forum for political debate for voicing grievances and opposing potentially arbitrary rulers. In their meetings the traditional social hierarchy and the corporate identity of the nobility found its expression. Given the fact that the prince’s court was less important, both in political and social terms, in the ecclesiastical dominions than elsewhere, the diets were all the more crucial in providing a social space that allowed the ruling elite

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to communicate and to define its political role. As elsewhere, attempts were undertaken in the late eighteenth century to rejuvenate these ancient representative bodies and give them a genuine role in the politics of the enlightenment, but such attempts foundered on the resistance of entrenched vested interests. Increasingly the Ritterschaften of the prince bishoprics were criticized by advocates of reform who saw their privileges as incompatible with the ideal of a more homogeneous noble elite comprising not only old and new families, but also possibly wealthy nonnoble landowners and officeholders. This was an ideal that gained support even among conservative-minded defenders of the ancien régime because of the French Revolution’s radical attack on all kinds of traditional social distinctions and on the nobility as a whole.47 It was only after 1815 that the nobility of the ancient prince bishoprics managed to adapt to the changes brought about by the upheaval in the wake of the French Revolution and the demise of the Holy Roman Empire, thereby assuming a new role in rural society in the nineteenth century, leading, inter alia, all the forces of political Catholicism.48

Notes 1. See Kersten Krüger, Die Landständische Verfassung (Munich, 2003) for a summary of recent research. 2. For the history of the Reichstag and the Empire, see Georg Schmidt, Geschichte des Alten Reiches (Munich, 1999) and Heinz Duchhardt, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1991). 3. Esther-Beate Körber, Öffentlichkeiten der frühen Neuzeit. Teilnehmer, Formen, Institutionen und Entscheidungen öffentlicher Kommunikation im Herzogtum Preußen von 1525 bis 1618 (Berlin, 1998); Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Einleitung [introduction]” to “Politisch-Soziale Praxis und symbolische Kultur der Landständischen Verfassungen im Westfälischen Raum,” Westfälische Forschungen 53 (2003): 1–240, 1–12. 4. See most recently, Robert v. Friedeburg [Introduction]: “ ‘Patria’ und ‘Patioten’ vor dem Patriotismus. Pflichten, Rechte, Glauben und die Rekonfigurierung europäischer Gemeinswesen im 17. Jahrhundert,” in: idem, ed., “Patria” und “Patioten” vor dem Patriotismus. Pflichten, Rechte, Glauben und die Rekonfigurierung europäischer Gemeinswesen im 17. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 2005), pp. 7–54, and idem, “In Defence of Patria. Resisting Magistrates and the Duties of Patriote in the Empire 1530s–1640s,” Sixteenth Century Journal 32 (2001): 357–82. 5. For an assessment of this thesis, see Ronald G. Asch, “Estates and Princes in Germany after 1648: The Results of the Thirty Years’ War,” German History 6 (1988): pp. 113–32.


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6. H.J. Ballschmieter, Andreas Gottlied von Bernstorff und der Mecklenburgische Ständekampf (1680–1720) (Cologne, 1962); Sigrid Jahns, “ ‘Mecklenburgisches Wesen’ oder absolutistisches Regiment? Mecklenburgischer Ständekampf und neue kaiserliche Reichspolitik (1658–1755),” in Reich und Regionen in Europa in Mittelalter und Neuzeit, ed. Paul-Joachim Heinig et al. (Berlin, 2000), pp. 323–51; Gabriele Haug-Moritz, Württembergischer Ständekonflikt und deutscher Dualismus. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Reichsverbandes in der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1992). 7. Wieland Held, Der Adel und August der Starke. Konflikt und Konfliktaustrag zwischen 1694 und 1707 in Kursachsen (Cologne, 1999). 8. Ronald G. Asch and Heinz Duchhardt, eds., Der Absolutismus- ein Mythos? (Cologne, 1996); Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism. Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (London, 1992), and Petr Mat’a and Thomas Winkelbauer, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie 1620–1740. Leistungen und Grenzen des Absolutismusparadigmas (Vienna, 2006). 9. Petr Mat’a, “Landstände und Landtage in den böhmischen und österreichischen Ländern (1620–1740). Von der Niedergangsgeschichte zur Interaktionsanalyse,” in Petr Mat’a and Thomas Winkelbauer, Die Habsburgermonarchie. See also Thomas Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht. Länder und Untertanen des Hauses Habsburg im konfessionellen Zeitalter, 2 parts (Vienna, 2003), 1, pp. 88–100, 109–13. 10. Ursula Löffler, “Herrschaft als soziale Praxis zwischen Dorf und Obrigkeit,” in Herrschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit. Umrisse eines dynamisch-kommunikativen Prozesses ed. Markus Meumann and Ralf Pröve (Münster, 2004), pp. 97–120 and the introduction to this volume by Meumann and Pröve, “Die Faszination des Staates und die historische Praxis. Zur Beschreibung von Herrschaftsbeziehungen jenseits telelogischer und dualistischer Begriffsbildungen,” ibid. pp. 11–49. 11. Wolfgang Neugebauer, Politischer Wandel im Osten. Ost- und Westpreußen von den alten Ständen zum Konstitutionalismus (Stuttgart, 1992), pp. 261–92; For a skeptical assesment of this revival of regional diets, see Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder des Volkes? Konzepte landständischer Repräsentation in der Spätphase des Alten Reiches (Berlin 1999), pp. 185–88. 12. Gilles André de la Roque, Traité de la noblesse (Paris, 1678), pp. 485–87. 13. Axel Flügel, Bürgerliche Rittergüter. Sozialer Wandel und politische Reform in Kursachsen (1680–1844) (Göttingen, 2000), pp. 72–84. 14. Mat’a, “Landstände,” cf. Anton Gindely, Die Entwicklung des böhmischen Adels und der Inkolatsverhältnisse seit dem 16. Jahrhundert (Prague, 1886). 15. René Schiller, “ ‘Edelleute müssen Güther haben, Bürgen müssen die Elle gebrauchen’: Friderizianische Adelsschutzpolitik und die Folgen”, in: Wolfgang Neugebauer and Ralph Pröve, eds., Agrarische Verfassung

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16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

Ronald G. Asch und Politische Struktur. Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte Preußens 1700–1918 (Berlin, 1998), pp. 257–86. Wolfgang Neugebauer, Standschaft als Verfassungsproblem. Die historischen Grundlagen ständischer Partizipation in ostmitteleuropäischen Regionen (Goldbach, 1995), pp. 58–66. Peter Wende, Die geistlichen Staaten und ihre Auflösung im Urteil der zeitgenössischen Publizistik (Lübeck/Hamburg 1966), pp. 9–15; cf. more recently Kurt Andermann, Die geistlichen Staaten am Ende des Alten Reiches. Versuch einer Bilanz (Epfendorf, 2004), and Bettina Braun, Frank Göttmann and Michael Ströhmer, Geistliche Staaten im Nordwesten des Alten Reiches. Forschungen zum Problem frühmoderner Staatlichkeit (Cologne, 2003). Friedrich Carl von Moser, Über die Regierung der geistlichen Staaten in Deutschland (Frankfurt/M and Leipzipg, 1787), p. 62. Ibid., pp. 75–81. Ibid., p. 183. See p. 150. See Johannes Arndt, Das niederrheinisch-westfälische Reichsgrafenkollegium und seine Mitglieder (1805–1806) (Mainz, 1991), p. 301, and P. Hersche, Die deutschen Domkapitel im 17. und 18. Jahrundert, 3 vols. (Berne, 1984), II, pp. 115–37. The chapter of Strasburg cathedral was even stricter and required candidates to prove that they had 32 noble ancestors, that is that all their ancestors five not just four generations back had to be members of the high nobility. See Christophe Duhamelle, L’Héritage collectif. La noblesse d’église Rhénane, 17e–18e siècles (Paris, 1998), pp. 105–6. For the relationship between imperial free knights and prince bishoprics see Volker Press, “Kurmainz und die Reichsritterschaft,” in idem, Adel im Alten Reich, ed. Franz Brendle and Anton Schindling (Tübingen, 1998), pp. 265–80 and idem, Die “Reichsritterschaft im Reich der Frühen Neuzeit,” ibid. pp. 205–32, For conflicts regarding such rights of access see Friedrich Keinemann, Das Domkapitel zu Münster im 18. Jahrhundert. Verfassung, persönliche Zusammensetzung, Parteiverhältnisse (Münster, 1967). For Osnabrück, see Johannes Frhr. von Boeselager, Die Osnabrücker Domherren des 18. Jahrhunderts (Osnabrück, 1990) and Ronald G. Asch, “ ‘Wie die Fledermäuse’? Die Osnabrücker Ritterschaft im 18. Jahrhundert,” Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch 75 (2003): 161–84. For Minden see William C. Schrader, “The Cathedral Chapter at Minden and its Members, 1650–1803,” Westfälische Zeitschrift 139 (1989): 83–122, and for Hildesheim Justus Lücke, Die landständische Verfassung im Hochstift Hildesheim, 1643–1802 (Hildesheim, 1968). Aloys Winterling, Der Hof des Kurfüsten von Köln, 1688–1794. Eine Fallstudie zur Bedeutung absolutistischer Hofhaltung (Bonn, 1986),


26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

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pp. 52–53, cf. Arndt, Reichsgrafenkollegium, pp. 298–303, in general for the counts of the empire and their access to cathedral chapters. Winterling, Hof, p. 52, and Rudolfine Freiin von Oer, “Landständische Verfassungen in den geistlichen Fürstentümern Nordwestdeutschlands,” in Ständische Vertretungen in Europa im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Dietrich Gerhard (Göttingen, 1969), pp. 72–93. Marcus Weidner, Landadel in Münster 1600–1760: Stadtverfassung, Standesbehauptung und Fürstenhof, 2 vols. (Münster, 2000), 1, pp. 173–75, and Ulf Brüning, “Wege landständischer Entscheidungsfindung. Das Verfahren auf den Landtagen des rheinsihen Erzstifts zur Zeit Clemens Augusts,” in Der Riss im Himmel. Clemens August und seine Epoche, vol. 2. Im Wechselspiel der Kräfte, Politische Entwicklungen des 17 und 18. Jahrhunderts in Kurköln, ed. Franz Günther Zehnder (Cologne, 1999), pp. 160–84, at p. 163. Michael Kissener, Ständemacht und Kirchenreform. Bischöfliche Wahkapitulationen im Nordwesten des Alten Reiches (Paderborn, 1993), and Rudolf Vierhaus, “Wahlkapitulationen in den geistlichen Staaten des Reiches im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Herrschaftsverträge, Wahlkapitulationen, Fundamentalgesetze, ed. Rudolf Vierhaus (Göttingen, 1977), pp. 205–19. For Paderborn see Friedrich Jacobs. “Die Paderborner Landsätnde im 17 und 18. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Verfassunsgeschichte des Hochstifts Paderborn”, Westfälische Zeitschrift 93 II (1937): 42–112, at S. 60–65; after 1735 even knights were excluded who were undoubtedly of ancient noble extractions when they had married a woman from a non-noble or recently ennobled family. For the “Kappengang”, Leopold Schütte, “Die Landstände des Fürstentums Paderborn gegen Ende des Alten Reiches”, in Klostersturm und Fürstenrevolution. Staat und Kirche zwischen Rhein und Weser 1794–1803, ed. Ulrike Gärtner and Judith Koppitsch (Dortmund, 2003), pp. 54–62, at p. 56. See for relevant arguments on Osnabrück, see Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv Osnabrück, Dep.1 b,. Nr.3, vol. I, the memorandum “In Sachen der Hochadlichen Ritterschaft des Hochstifts Osnabrück contra den Herrn Grafen von Bar,” (no date., early eighteenth century). (Sign A 1 v und B r). Flügel, Bürgerliche Rittergüter, pp. 72–84; Joachim Lampe, Aristokratie, Hofadel und Staatspatriziat in Kurhannover. Die Lebenskreise der höheren Beamten an den kurhannoverschen Zentralund Hofbehörden 1714–1760, 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1963), I: 283–84. Rudolfine Freiin von Oer, Der MünsterscheErbmännerstreit (Cologne, 1998); cf. Heinz Reif, Westfälischer Adel 1770–1860 (Göttingen 1979), pp. 44–46.

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34. For the metropolitan French nobility see Mathieu Marraud, La Noblesse de Paris au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris 2000). 35. Asch, “Fledermäuse.” 36. Nieders, Staatsarchiv Osnabrück, Dep. 1 b, Nr.. 176, letter by Moltke from Vienna June 21, 1755. 37. Reif, Westfälischer Adel, pp. 51, 52; Reif assumes a ratio of ecclesiastical to military office of 2 to 1, however, some officers later took holy orders and the proportion of cathedral canons to officers became 1 to 1. 38. Arndt, Reichsgrafenkollegium, p. 302; cf. Hersche, Domkapitel II: 49. 39. Weidner, Landadel, I, pp. 406–64, and Walter Rödel, Mainz und seine Bevölkerung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1985), pp. 61 and following; Arndt, Reichsgrafenkollegium, p. 299, and Étienne François, Koblenz im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1982). 40. Winterling, Hof, pp. 57–58. 41. Günter Christ, “Selbstverständnis und Rolle der Domkapitel in den geistlichen Territorien des alten Deutschen Reiches in der Frühneuzeit,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 16 (1989): 257–328, at pp. 318–19. 42. Ibid, p. 278; in Mainz the canons claimed that the archbishop derived his dignity from the chapter which had given “birth” to his elevation. 43. Winterling, Hof, pp. 102 and following. Weidner, Münster I, pp. 290–95. 44. Keinemann, Münster, pp. 78 and following. 45. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Die Wahlkapitulation als Landesgrundgesetz? Zur Umdeutung altständischer Verfassungsstrukturen in Kurmainz am Vorabend der Revolution”, in Menschen und Strukturen in der Geschichte Alteuropas. Festschrift für Johannes Kunisch, ed. Helmut Neuhaus and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (Berlin, 2002), pp. 379–404. 46. Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder, pp. 155–59, 177–81. 47. For this discussion, see August Wilhelm Rehberg, Über den deutschen Adel (Göttingen, 1803; repr. Königstein, 1979). 48. See Reif, Westfälischer Adel, pp. 176–212, 410–455.

Select Bibliography Sources Andermann, Kurt. Die geistlihen Staaten am Ende des Alten Reiches. Versuch einer Bilanz (Epfendorf, 2004). Asch, Ronald G. “Estates and Princes in Germany after 1648: The Results of the Thirty Years’ War.” German History 6 (1988): 113–32. Carsten, F.L. Princes and Parliament in Germany. From the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1963 [1959]). Duhamelle, Christophe. L’Héritage collectif. La noblesse d’église Rhénane, 17e–18e siècles (Paris, 1998). Estor, Johann Georg. Practische Anleitung zur Ahnenprobe so bei Teutschen Erzund Hochstiften, Ritterorden und Ganerbschaften gewöhnlich (Marburg, 1750).


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Frank, Philipp Anton. Etwas über die Wahlkapitulationen in den geistlichen Wahlstaaten (Frankfurt/M., 1788). Krüger, Kersten. Die Landständische Verfassung (Munich, 2003). Moser, Friedrich Carl von. Über die Regierung der geistlichen Staaten in Deutschland (Frankfurt/M and Leipzipg, 1787). Moser, Johann Jacob. Von der Teutschen Reichs-Stände Landen, deren Landständen, Unterthanen, LandesFreyheiten, Beschwerden, Schulden und Zusammenkünften (Frankfurt/M, Leipzig, 1768; repr. Osnabrück, 1967). Sartori, Edler von J. Geistliches und weltliches Staatsrecht der deutschen katholisch-geistlichen Erz-, Hoch. und Ritterstifter (Nürnberg, 1791). Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara. Vormünder des Volkes? Konzepte landständischer Repräsentation in der Spätphase des Alten Reiches (Berlin, 1999).


Chapter 6

Power, Politics and Parliament in Seventeenth- Century Irel and Jane Ohlmeyer

I

n the final paragraph of the Case of Ireland . . . stated (published in 1698), William Molyneux, an Irish Protestant, maintained that The rights of parliament should be preserved sacred and inviolable wherever they are found. This kind of government, once so universal all over Europe, is now almost vanished from amongst the nations thereof. Our king’s dominions [i.e., Ireland, Scotland, and England] are the only supporters of this noble gothick constitution, save only what little remains may be found thereof in Poland.1

Other Irishmen shared Molyneux’s belief that “the rights of parliament should be preserved sacred and inviolable.” Writing shortly after the opening session of the 1613 Parliament, an Old English recusant observed that “a parliament is in the nature of a principle wh[ich] a man must believe in, without dispute or question.”2 Nearly thirty years later, in July 1641, the Irish House of Commons reiterated the centrality of parliament to the exercise of power in Ireland and declared, “The subjects of this his majesty’s kingdom are a free people, and to be governed only according to the common-law of England, and statutes made and established by the parliament in this kingdom of Ireland, and according to the lawful customs used in the same.”3 The Earl of Castlehaven later underscored the worth of parliament as a representative assembly. Parliament, he wrote in his

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memoirs, had become “the only way the nation had to express their loyalty and prevent their being misrepresented to their sovereign.”4 The institution so cherished by Castlehaven in 1641 was very different from the one revered by Molyneux at the end of the century. Though in no sense representative, the prewar Irish parliaments did include elected Catholic and Protestant MPs from a variety of ethnic backgrounds (native Irish, Old English, New English, and Scottish).5 Natives and newcomers alike acknowledged the centrality of Irish parliamentary sovereignty and accepted the extent to which kingship underpinned the exercise of political power. Events surrounding the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and especially the rise of the Westminster parliament as an alternative source of power fundamentally challenged and then changed these assumptions and further highlighted Ireland’s position as a colony.6 Of course the Irish parliaments examined in this paper (those of 1613–15, 1634–35, 1640–48, and 1661–66) profoundly shaped the nature of the English conquest. Yet they were much more than instruments of colonial government.7 A study of these bodies and the Confederate General Assemblies that met during the civil wars of the 1640s, vividly recaptures the messy realities of the exercise of power in a world where Catholic and Protestant political leaders vied to defend parliamentary principles and the legislative supremacy of the Dublin, not Westminster, parliament and to galvanize constitutional resistance. This is a story of compromise and cooperation that first began in 1613 under the aegis of Old English leadership but by 1640 had expanded to include Protestant colonists. During these years an “opposition” emerged which pitted itself against an increasingly effective government administration. Ultimately, however, these were years of conflict. They saw the transfer of political and parliamentary power from the hands of one colonial elite, the Catholic Old English, to those of another, the Protestant ascendancy. Historians have long recognized the importance of studying Irish parliamentary history, despite the incomplete nature of the record. There are no diaries and few division lists. The printed journals of the Irish Commons began only in 1613 and those for the Lords in 1634.8 From the scrappy evidence that has survived, historians have reconstructed the procedures and protocols including those that accompanied the opening of a parliament. These largely followed English practice—the election of the speaker, respect for the ancient privileges of the lower house (freedom from arrest and the freedom to speak freely), and the daily routine of sitting from 8 or 9 a.m. until midday and reserving the afternoons for committee work.9 The Dublin assembly even followed English precedents to exercise the parliamentary right of impeachment.10 The very

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Englishness of the Irish parliament is what interests some. For as T.W. Moody observed in 1938, “the system of government built up by the Anglo-Normans in Ireland is the only example of the exportation of English institutions prior to England’s acquisition of colonies in North America.” As a result “the operation of that system is of great importance for English constitutional history.”11 The constitutional and political influences of the early modern Irish assemblies on American colonial developments, especially in the 1770s, have been noted.12 In fact, one wonders if the Irish parliament’s status as the first representative assembly in the British Empire explains why the English parliamentary report of 1932 on the House of Commons recommended that appropriate funding be secured for the study of its history.13 While the wider British, Atlantic, and Imperial contexts are significant, it is the history of the Irish parliament as a national assembly that has engaged scholars of medieval and early modern Ireland.14 Brendan Bradshaw, Ciaran Brady, and Steven Ellis have focused on the workings of the sixteenth-century parliaments of 1536–37, 1541–43, 1557, 1560, 1569–70, and 1585–86.15 Aidan Clarke,16 Donal Cregan,17 Hugh Kearney,18 Patrick Kelly,19 Bríd McGrath,20 Micheál Ó Siochrú,21 and Michael Perceval-Maxwell22 have worked on various aspects of the history of the seventeenth-century assemblies of 1613–15, 1634–35, 1640–48, and 1661–66, together with the nine Confederate General Assemblies.23 Most populated of all is eighteenth-century Irish parliamentary history that has attracted (to name but a few) Tom Bartlett, Sean Connolly, David Hayton, James Kelly, Eoin Magennis, Anthony Malcomson, Ivar McGrath, along with Edith Mary Johnston whose monumental six-volume history of the Commons (1692–1800) was published in 2002.24 Thanks to these pioneering studies a reasonably clear picture has been painted of when and where early modern Irish parliaments met, who attended and what was the particular significance of religious and ethnic groupings, especially the Old English. The membership of the House of Lords and the activities of the temporal peers have been documented, albeit more remains to be done.25 We know how parliament functioned, what its processes and protocols were, and how political patronage appears to have operated (though patronage networks would merit further detailed investigation). The detailed workings of electoral politics and the complexities surrounding the exercise of parliamentary power in the localities especially for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remain to be fully recovered.26 To date, however, the focus has been on the political and the constitutional. Thus, despite the survival of the statues, little is known of the social and

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cultural consequences of parliamentary legislation.27 The centrality of lawyers to parliamentary proceedings has been researched but the role played by other professional or social groupings remains more opaque.28 While historians acknowledge the importance of state rituals and pageantry, especially those associated with the opening of parliament, not much work has been undertaken either on how this glorified the position of the chief governor (and the monarch he represented); or the significance of parliament as a public space.29 Finally, little has been done to compare and contrast the experiences and the development of the Irish parliament with other representative assemblies elsewhere in early modern Europe.30 This brief chapter cannot begin to summarize fully what historians have uncovered, let alone address these gaps. Instead it will focus on three interlinked themes. First, it briefly explores the nature of parliamentary sovereignty in seventeenth-century Ireland and how kingship underpinned the exercise of political power. Second, the chapter analyses the extent to which parliament served as an instrument of colonial government. Finally, it examines the response of the parliamentary opposition, often led by Catholic, Old English lawyers trained at the Inns of Court in London, to government attempts to manipulate one or both houses. According to Moody, “The existence of a strong, well-defined and not wholly unorganized opposition, confronting an equally well-defined government party, distinguishes the Irish house of commons from its English counterpart.”31 How then did this “opposition” defend parliamentary principles and act as a force of constitutional resistance?

Kingship and the Exercise of Power The Dublin parliament, having become an exclusively Protestant body, met very regularly between 1692 and the Anglo-Irish Union of 1800–01 and from 1715 it was constantly in session. It had become, as David Hayton reminds us, “an institution, rather than an event.”32 Parliament had met infrequently in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.33 From the 1530s until 1603, a period of seventy-three years, eight parliaments had assembled usually sitting for a year, two at most. There were only five Stuart parliaments. James VI and I’s only Irish parliament, which was the first assembly to meet since 1585–86 opened in 1613. This body had three sessions that lasted for one week, six weeks, and four weeks or a total of eleven weeks. Charles I’s first Dublin parliament met between July 1634 and April 1635 (with three sessions lasting in all nearly twenty weeks) and his second


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between 1640 and 1648. Charles II’s Irish parliament met between 1661 and 1666, but in fact it sat for less than three of the five years. In 1689 James II convened what is known as the “Patriot Parliament” that met for only twelve weeks. Brendan Bradshaw attributed the irregular meetings of the Irish parliament to the passage of Poynings’ Law (1494). Originally designed to curb the power of an overmighty chief governor, Poynings’ Law mandated that no parliament could meet in Ireland unless licensed to do so by the king and that the king and his English council approved all legislation to be submitted to an Irish parliament.34 Thus Poynings’ Law restricted the legislative function of the Irish parliament. The 1613–15 Parliament only passed a subsidy bill and ten statutes, a fraction of what had been contemplated.35 The legislative record of the 1634–35 Parliament was, however, very different with seventy-two statutes being enshrined in law.36 This extraordinary level of activity that has been attributed to Lord Deputy Wentworth’s close working relationship with Charles I and his bullying tactics (rigging the elections, manipulating the Commons, arrest of MPs and so on) was repeated in the first session of the 1640 Parliament that passed fourteen laws.37 The removal of Wentworth and the outbreak of civil war ended this legislative bonanza until the Restoration Parliament passed eighty-seven bills, including the controversial and lengthy (600 pages) Act of Settlement (July 31, 1662), followed by the Act of Explanation (December 23, 1665).38 Whatever the legislative significance of Poynings’ Law, it is important to note the extent to which Poynings’ shaped—and continued to shape throughout both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the constitutional relationship between Ireland, the English council and, above all, the English king.39 The other key constitutional development was the passage of the Kingship Act in 1541, which transformed Ireland’s status from a lordship into an imperial kingdom: That his Majesty, his heirs and successors, be from henceforth named . . . kings of this land of Ireland . . . for ever, as united and knit to the imperial crown of the realm of England.40 (italics mine)

The phrase “united and knit” implied that the two kingdoms were equal, albeit under the rule of the English sovereign (but not his English parliament).41 Yet according to the English statute that gave legislative sanction to the act, it “united and annexed [Ireland] forever to the Imperial crown of his highness’ realm of England.”42 Thus from the outset the roles played by the English and Irish parliaments in defining

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the nature of kingship in its Irish context were ambiguous and understandably resulted in a variety of interpretations, particularly during the 1640s and after 1688 when the tortured working relationship between the king and his English parliament disintegrated.43 Equally, English military victories after 1649 reinforced Ireland’s position as a vanquished and conquered nation. Moreover, with the passage of the Adventurer’s Act (1642) and the Acts of Settlement (1652, 1662, and 1665) the English parliament asserted its legislative supremacy—something it continued to do for the rest of the seventeenth century.44 Yet for most of this period it was the king, not his English parliament, who represented—in the words of Aidan Clarke—the source of “supreme political authority in Ireland.”45 In short, kingship determined the exercise of political power in Ireland and the center of that power was not Dublin Castle or Westminster Palace but the royal court in Whitehall. The ability of ecclesiastical, legal, and landed power brokers to gain access to the person of the monarch and to the patronage networks that enmeshed him and his household profoundly shaped Irish politics. Throughout the seventeenth century promoters of Protestant and Catholic interests vied for the attention and munificence of the king, his family, favorites, and ministers.46 Chief governors, members of the Dublin government, and the Established Church, together with prominent landed grandees, especially successive generations of the Boyles of Cork and the Butlers of Ormond, regularly importuned those who wielded power and patronage in London.47 Catholic Ireland was also effectively represented at Whitehall. Prior to 1641 the recusant earls of Clanricard and Antrim enjoyed direct access to Charles I and his Catholic consort and to influential patronage networks. Time and again they used these effectively both to protect and promote their own political interests and those of their Catholic followers.48 Later generations of well-placed Irish Catholics followed their example. Thanks in part to bonds forged during a decade of continental exile during the 1650s, a select band of Irish Catholics, especially the Talbot brothers and the Earls of Carlingford and Clancarthy enjoyed royal favor and the patronage of leading courtiers throughout the later decades of the seventeenth century.49

Early Stuart Parliamentary Politics The need to promote the interests of one group over those of another also characterized parliamentary politics in Dublin throughout the seventeenth century. Traditionally the Anglo-Irish, Catholic ruling elite (or the Old English as they became known from the early seventeenth century) had dominated political processes and


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parliamentary structures, to the virtual exclusion of the Gaelic-speaking “native Irish.”50 However by the early seventeenth century the Crown and its Dublin executive were determined to replace the Catholic majorities in the Elizabethan parliaments with those who supported the Protestant interest. Thus James VI of Scotland who later became James I of England created forty parliamentary boroughs out of the newly founded plantation towns with the specific intention of packing the 1613 Irish House of Commons with Protestant MPs and thereby diluting the hitherto predominant Old English influences. The state’s electoral strategy resulted in the return of a hundred Catholics (only one of whom was from Ulster) and 134 Protestants (sixty-three of whom were from Ulster). For the first time Protestants enjoyed a majority in the lower house.51 These encroachments strengthened the resolve of the “opposition” to resist. From the late sixteenth century, the opposition—invariability Catholic and of Old English provenance—focused on religious and constitutional grievances over the collection of cess (or taxation) without their consent, their exclusion from government, and their identity as the English of Ireland. Catholic opposition to the government’s preparations for parliament had begun in November 1612 when some of the leading lords of the Pale claimed that they had the right to be consulted about bills that were to be presented to parliament. Their obstructionist tactics continued when, much to the king’s disgust and the embarrassment of Lord Deputy Chichester, they disrupted the opening session of the 1613 Parliament. Led by the lawyers, the opposition disputed the legality of the Protestant majority and became involved in an unseemly scuffle to replace the government nominee for speaker (Sir John Davies) with their own candidate, Sir John Everard, a noted lawyer. When Everard was ejected, the opposition, encouraged by the Old English peers withdrew, thus effectively sabotaging the proceedings.52 Furious, the king prorogued parliament and summoned the recalcitrant recusant MPs to London. How, demanded James, could the Irish claim to be “loyal vassals when they had given their souls to the Pope and their bodies to the king of Spain”?53 Baulking at the prospect of further confrontation, James finally acquiesced to the demands of his “half subjects,” which reduced the working Protestant majority to four (since many of these members failed to attend even this was meaningless).54 The compromise meant that the MPs ended their boycott and parliamentary business resumed without further incident.55 For the time being the Old English had clung on to their privileged position as political and parliamentary power brokers. By 1634 the

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situation was very different. Lord Deputy Wentworth was determined to ensure that, rather than being an instrument of the former colonial elite, the Irish parliament would serve as a tool of government. In the lower house the government now held a clear majority with 142 Protestant MPs, many of them recent planters, together with a high number of officeholders and nonresidents, often Wentworth clients. New temporal creations gave the government full control of the upper house for the first time. Back in 1613 twelve Catholic and four Protestant peers had attended the Lords, leaving the government embarrassingly dependent on the support of twenty bishops. However by 1634 the composition of the upper house had been radically transformed. Membership trebled to 123 peers, 24 lords spiritual and 99 lords temporal. Of the temporal peers, two-thirds were Protestant and one-third nonresident.56 Wentworth’s strategy for managing the Lords revolved on his control over the thirty-six proxies of absent peers, preferring “their proxies” to “their company.”57 To further consolidate his position, Wentworth also forged during the early weeks of the parliament a temporary alliance with the Old English activists (many of whom had formed the backbone of the opposition in 1613). This facilitated the passage in the first session of four subsidy bills and other important legislation. However, the lord deputy’s refusal to enshrine in statute the “Graces” (religious and landed concessions that Charles I had promised the Old English back in 1628) shattered this uneasy coalition. Yet, ultimately Wentworth succeeded in pushing through a carefully prepared body of government legislation. In the process he not only alienated key members of the Old English community, but also many Protestant New English planters by depriving them of administrative office or challenging their titles to land. From Wentworth’s perspective the 1634–35 Parliament, with its raft of government legislation, had proved an overwhelming success and he planned to deploy his “divide and rule” strategy in the parliament that assembled in March 1640. However on this occasion his political enemies—Catholic and Protestant, Old and New English—allied against him. With few exceptions, Wentworth’s policies had seriously challenged the personal power bases of the landed elite, and so the determination of his enemies in both houses to get rid of him, his cronies, and his policies comes as no surprise. Working closely with their allies in Westminster and, more importantly, at court, this crossdenominational coalition finally secured the chief governor’s downfall (he was beheaded on May 12, 1641).58 Having successfully ousted Wentworth, the opposition, led again by Catholic lawyers, focused their efforts on a reform program to dismantle any policies—especially those


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that related to land tenure and plantation—that threatened to undermine their Irish power bases.59 Central to their strategy was a determination to restrict the power of the executive by insisting that the Irish judges respond to the twenty-one “Queries,” that questioned the legality of Wentworth’s government of Ireland since 1634. In short, the opposition was using parliament as a force for constitutional change. The parliament of 1640–41 marked an important departure in a number of respects. The parliament’s reform strategy, formulated by the opposition that incorporated many issues that had traditionally been the preserve of the Old English, now represented a wider basis for cooperation and compromise than hitherto thought possible. This aimed to turn the clock back to the 1620s, “when a weak, irresolute, and financially dependent administration was constantly vulnerable to organized pressure and had been forced to govern through concession and compromise.”60 It also sought to clarify Anglo-Irish constitutional relationships by stressing the primacy of the Irish parliament as a legislative body and its importance as the principal point of contact between the king and his Irish subjects. “The subjects of this his majesty’s kingdom are a free people” opined the House of Commons, adding they were “to be governed only according to the common-law of England, and statutes made and established by the parliament in this kingdom of Ireland, and according to the lawful customs used in the same.”61

Civil War and Catholic Interests While many of these issues continued to be debated throughout the 1640s, and again after the Restoration, the onset of civil war after October 1641 shattered prewar political groupings. A small Protestant parliamentary rump lingered on in Dublin until 1648 while the bulk of the Catholic peers, together with many MPs, took their seats in one or more of the nine confederate General Assemblies that met at Kilkenny between 1642 and 1649 (in 1643 the meeting was held in Waterford).62 Following nationwide elections, these assemblies met at least once a year with sessions lasting from three weeks to over three months and represented all elements of the Catholic population. In all, 104 former MPs sat in the confederate Assemblies and on its executive, the Supreme Council. As with the prewar parliaments the influence of the lawyers here is clearly discernable.63 Usually seven lawyers sat on the Supreme Council and they generally formed the majority of the twelve “resident” members who were required to remain at the seat of government. In fact, as Micheál Ó Siochrú’s excellent study of

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confederate Ireland demonstrates, professional lawyers formed the bedrock of confederate politics and “invariably dominated not only assembly meetings but almost all confederate councils and committees.”64 The lawyers, together with the ex-parliamentarians, continued to represent landed interests and brought to the confederate assembly experience of parliamentary procedures, practices, and traditions.65 Legislative structure followed parliamentary practice and one of the first acts passed by the 1642 General Assembly specifically mandated that “the common laws of England and Ireland . . . and all other statutes . . . shall be punctually observed within this kingdom.” Another confederate act specified that any land transfers that occurred would later have to be ratified by a free parliament—a clear recognition of parliament’s position as the supreme source of authority in Ireland.66 The architecture of confederate government and the exercise of power also closely resembled pre–641 structures and processes. Aside from the fact that the General Assembly was a unicameral body and, that the executive (or the Supreme Council) was subordinate to the legislature, the General Assembly was modeled on parliament. It was convened by writs issued to lords temporal and spiritual, as well as to counties and boroughs entitled to return members and the 1542 Act continued to determine the county and borough forty-shilling franchise. More innovative, but little studied, were the networks of provincial and county councils that formed an intimate part of the framework of confederate government.67 In the event the confederate political experiment proved shortlived. The parliament that met in 1661 was very different from the prewar one. For the first time Old English influences had been removed from the Commons that was now exclusively Protestant. However, the readmission of Catholic peers to the Lords afforded some political clout to a “Catholic” interest.68 Interestingly, despite the trauma of civil war and Cromwellian occupation, prewar intermarriage had helped to forge a more traditional political elite with common interests that transcended ethnic differences and religious divides.69 But the forces of continuity that linked the prewar and postwar parliaments should not disguise the very real changes that had occurred during the 1640s and 1650s, especially the decisive shift in the balance of power toward the English parliament. It was little wonder that after 1666, Irish peers spent ever-increasing amounts of time in London.70 Deprived of a political voice at home, Irish Catholics also flocked to London. The focus of their attentions was not Westminster, but the royal court at Whitehall, where an influential


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group promoted the Catholic interest and their own political and landed agendas with the same energy and sophistication as their predecessors had done.71

Sovereignty of Irish Parliament In conclusion, one asks the question—how typical were seventeenthcentury Irish parliaments of representative assemblies elsewhere? Hugh Kearney, Wentworth’s biographer, has suggested that the early Stuart parliaments were fairly typical of local representative assemblies that were “summoned at irregular intervals to discuss the remedy of local grievances in return for grants of financial aid.”72 Whether in Ireland, France, Catalonia, or Germany, landed interests dominated political agendas and while these assemblies served as instruments of government, compromises between interest groups were common. In other respects developments in Ireland conformed to European patterns. For example, the creation of a service elite during the early decades of the century gave rise to tensions in parliament that mirrored struggles in France between the noblesse de la robe and the noblesse de l’épée. “The parallel with France may be reinforced,” Kearney reminds us, “if we recall that Richelieu followed James I’s example [in 1613] in doubling the membership of the local parlements and creating at one stroke a built-in court majority to support his policies.”73 The breakdown of central authority in France that is associated with the Fronde enjoys a number of striking similarities with developments in Ireland during the 1640s. The big difference was that “The Irish Robe went to Hell or to Connacht, the French Robe to Heaven and to Versailles.”74 Recently Geoffrey Parker has identified seventeen common denominators between the four major rebellions against Philip IV (in Catalonia, Portugal, Sicily, and Naples) and those against Charles I (in Ireland, Scotland, and England). All sought to restore their “Ancient Constitutions” and to protect against encroachments from the center upon what they perceived as their traditional parliamentary rights.75 In this respect the Catholic confederates, like the prewar Old English lawyers, were as much “constitutional nationalists” as the insurgents in Italy or Catalonia or Scotland. Like William Molyneux writing over fifty years later or the parliamentarians in the early Stuart assemblies, the confederates simply wanted to defend the sovereignty of the Irish parliament and to ensure that “the rights of parliament” be “preserved sacred and inviolable.”76

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Notes I am grateful to Bríd McGrath, Ivar McGrath and Micheál Ó Siochrú for their comments on this chapter and for drawing to my attention a number of important references. 1. Quoted in C.J. Caldicott, “The Irish Parliament and the Etats du Languedoc, 1642–1689; Regional Assemblies and the Doctrine of Law” in Culture et Pratiques Politiques en France et en Irlande XVIe–XVIIIe Siècle, ed. Louis Bergeron and Louis Cullen (Paris, 1991), p. 21. 2. Brian Jackson, ed., “A Document on the Parliament of 1613 from St. Isidore’s College, Rome,” Analecta Hibernica 33 (1986). p. 50. 3. Quoted in Aidan Clarke, “Colonial Constitutional Attitudes in Ireland, 1640–1660,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 90, section Cf, 11 (1990), p. 359. 4. James Touchet, Earl of Castlehaven, The Earl of Castlehaven’s Review, or, His Memoirs of His Engagement and Carriage in the Irish Wars (London, 1684), p. 40. 5. An act of 1542 restricted the county franchise to forty-shilling-freeholders and ensured that neither body genuinely represented the interests of the electorate. Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, “Imagining Political Representation in Seventeenth-Century Ireland” in Community in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin (Dublin, 2006). 6. Patrick Little, “The English Parliament and the Irish Constitution, 1641–1649” in Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s, ed. Micheál Ó Siochrú (Dublin, 2001) and “Irish Representation in the Protectorate Parliaments,” Parliamentary History, 23 (2004); Robert Armstrong, “Ireland at Westminster: the Long Parliament’s Irish Committees, 1641–1647” in Parliament at Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power, and Public Access in Early Modern England, ed. Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey (Woodbridge, 2002); and Neil Longley York, Neither Kingdom nor Nation: The Irish Quest for Constitutional Rights, 1698–1800 (Washington, 1994). 7. For the “Patriot Parliament” of 1689, see J.G. Simms, The Jacobite Parliament of 1689 (Dundalk, 1966) and Thomas Osborne Davis, The Patriot Parliament Of 1689, with its Statutes, Roles and Proceedings, ed. Charles Gavan Duffy (London, 1893). 8. Journal of the House of Commons . . . of Ireland, 28 vols. (Dublin, 1753–91) and Journals of the Irish House of Lords of the Kingdom of Ireland, 8 vols. (Dublin, 1779–1800), I (1634–98). Even then there are glaring omissions. Lord Mountmorres noted that the journals of the Commons were “defective” until 1764 and that the proceedings for the years between 1641 and 1647 were only recovered during the late seventeenth century, The History of the Principal Transactions of the


9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

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Irish Parliament (1634–66), 2 vols. (London, 1792; repr. Shannon, 1971), II, p. 71. In 1661 it was ordered that “The books of the House of Lords, in 1640 and 1642, [be] expunged, where they contained anything that did intrench upon the honour of the late earl of Strafford, the late bishop of Derry, the Lord Chancellor Bolton, and several others” (Lords Journal, Ireland I, p. 274. Also see Paul Christianson, “The Obliterated Portions of the House of Lords Journals Dealing with the Attainder of Strafford, 1641,” EHR 95 (1980), pp. 339–53. There were two types of committees—select committees (after a second reading a bill was referred to a select committee) and standing committees such as the “Grand Committee.” By the Restoration, the House of Commons had three standing committees, the committee of privileges, the committee of grievances, and the committee of trade. John McCafferty, “ ‘To follow the Late Precedents of England’: The Irish Impeachment Proceedings of 1641” in Mysteries and Solutions in Irish Legal History, ed. D.S. Greer and N.M. Dawson (Dublin, 2001). T.W. Moody, “The Irish Parliament under Elizabeth and James I: A General Survey,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Section C, 45 (1940 for 1938–40), p. 41. Charles Howard McIllwain, The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation (1958) and Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Heritage of the Constitutional Era (Philadelphia, 1986), who has noted the popularity of the ideas of a number of Irish writers—Sir John Davies, William Petty, and more especially William Molyneux—among the American colonists, especially in the 1770s. In the event it was decided “to omit the Irish parliament from the scope of the official English History of Parliament.” The Irish Committee of Historical Sciences attempted to launch an Irish History of Parliament (see IHS 2, p. 212). Despite being led by Moody (one of the founding fathers of Irish historical revisionism) published outputs were limited to D.B. Quinn, “Parliaments and Great Councils in Ireland, 1481–1586,” IHS 3 (1942) and Moody, “The Irish Parliament.” Also see David Hayton’s introduction to The Irish Parliament in the Eighteenth Century. The Long Apprenticeship (Edinburgh, 2001), pp. 16–18. Art Cosgrove, “Parliament and the Anglo-Irish community: The Declaration of 1460” in Parliament and Community, ed. Art Cosgrove and James McGuire (Belfast, 1983); Aubrey Gwynn, “The Irish Parliament in the Middle Ages,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 42 (1953); James F. Lydon, “Parliament and the Community of Ireland” in Law and Disorder in Thirteenth-Century Ireland: the Dublin Parliament of 1297, ed. James F. Lydon (Dublin, 1997); H.G. Richardson, “The Irish Parliament Rolls of the Fifteenth Century,” EHR 58 (1943); H.G. Richardson and G.O. Sayles, The Irish Parliament in the Middle Ages, Études préséntées à la Commission

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15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Jane Ohlmeyer internationale pour l’Histoire des Assemblées d’États 10 (Philadelphia, PA and London, 1952); G.O. Sayles, “Modus tenendi parliamentum: Irish or English?” in England and Ireland in the later Middle Ages, ed. James F. Lydon (Dublin, 1981). Brendan Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979) and “The Beginnings of Modern Ireland” in The Irish Parliamentary Tradition, ed. Brian Farrell (Dublin and New York, 1973); Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governors: The Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland (Cambridge, UK, 1994); S.G. Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors 1447–1603. English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule, later edition (London [1998]), Reform and Revival. English Government in Ireland 1470–1534 (London, 1986) and “Parliament and Community in Yorkist and Tudor Ireland” in Parliament and Community, ed. Cosgrove and McGuire (Belfast, [1983]). Also see R. Dudley Edwards, “The Irish Reformation Parliament of Henry VIII, 1556–7” in T.W. Moody, ed., Historical Studies VI (London, 1968). Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625–42 (London and Ithaca, l966; paperback edition, Dublin, 2000), The Graces, 1625–41 (Dundalk, 1967), Prelude to Restoration: The End of the Commonwealth, 1659–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), “A Note on the Parliament of l634,” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 97 (1967), “A Discourse between Two Councillors Of State, the One of England and the Other of Ireland” [B.L. Egerton MS 917], Analecta Hibernica 26 (1970), “The Policies of the ‘Old English’ in Parliament, 1640–1” in Historical Studies V, ed. J.L. McCracken (London, 1965), and “The History of Poynings’ Law, 1615–1641,” IHS 18 (1972). Donal Cregan, “The Personnel of the Confederation of Kilkenny,” IHS 29 (1995), “The Confederation of Kilkenny” in Irish Parliamentary Tradition, ed. Farrell and “Some Members of the Confederation of Kilkenny” in Measgra Ig Cuimhne Mhíchíl Uí Chléirigh, ed. S. O’Brien (Dublin, 1944). Hugh Kearney, Strafford in Ireland 1633–41: A Study in Absolutism (repr. Cambridge, 1989) and “The Irish Parliament in the Early Seventeenth Century” in Irish Parliamentary Tradition, ed. Farrell. Patrick Kelly, “William Molyneux and the Spirit of Liberty in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Idris an da chultur 3 (1988), “Recasting a Tradition: William Molyneux and the Sources of The Case of Ireland . . . Stated (1698)” in Kingdom or Colony?: Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland, ed. Jane Ohlmeyer (Cambridge, UK, 2000) and “Conquest versus Consent as the Basis of the English Title to Ireland in William Molyneux’s Case of Ireland . . . Stated (1698)” in British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (Cambridge, UK, 2005). Bríd McGrath, “A Biographical Dictionary of the Membership of the Irish House of Commons 1640–1641,” unpublished PhD thesis,


21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

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Trinity College, Dublin, 1997; “The Membership of the Irish House of Commons, 1613–15,” unpublished MLitt thesis, Trinity College, Dublin, 1986; “The Irish elections of 1640–1641” in British Interventions, ed. Brady and Ohlmeyer; and “Parliament Men and the Confederate Association” in Kingdoms in Crisis, ed. Ó Siochrú. Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649 (Dublin, 1999) and “Catholic Confederates and the Constitutional Relationship between Ireland and England, 1641–1649” in British Interventions, ed. Brady and Ohlmeyer. Michael Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion (Dublin, 1994); “Ulster 1641 in the Context of Political Developments in the Three Kingdoms,” in Ulster 1641: Aspects, ed. Brian Mac Cuarta (Belfast, 1993); and Michael Perceval-Maxwell, “Protestant Faction, the Impeachment of Strafford and the Origins of the Irish Civil War,” Canadian Journal of History 17, 2 (1982). Also see Coleman A. Dennehy, “Parliament in Ireland, 1661–6,” unpublished MLitt thesis, University College Dublin, 2002, and F.M. O’Donoghue, “Parliament in Ireland under Charles II,” unpublished MA thesis, University College Dublin, 1970. Parliament met in 1692, 1695–99, 1703–11, 1713, 1715–27, 1727–60, 1761–68, 1769–76, 1776–83, 1783–90, 1790–97, and 1798–1800. On January 1, 1801 the union of Ireland and Great Britain came into effect. Space does not permit inclusion of a full list of the publications relating to these parliaments; for an excellent recent overview, see The Irish Parliament in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Hayton, especially the essays by McGrath, Magennis, Kelly, and Malcomson; and E.M. Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish Parliament, 1692–1800: Commons, Constituencies and Statutes, 6 vols.(Belfast, 2002). Victor Treadwell, “The House of Lords in the Irish Parliament of 1613–15,” EHR 80 (1965); Jane Ohlmeyer, “The Irish Peers, Political Power and Parliament, 1640–41” in British Interventions, ed. Brady and Ohlmeyer; and Francis G. James, The Lords of the Ascendancy: The Irish House of Lords and its Members 1600–1800 (Dublin, 1995). Bríd McGrath, “Inistigoe’s Elections in 1640,” Old Kilkenny Review 57 (2005) and “County Meath Members of Parliament, 1560–1613,” Ríocht na Midhe 9, 2 (1996). Statutes At Large Passed in the Parliaments Held in Ireland (1300–1800), 20 vols. (Dublin, 1786–1801); also see Richard Bolton’s earlier compilation of statutes from 3 Edward II to 11 James I, published in Dublin 1621 and A Collection of All the Statutes Now in Use in the Kingdom of Ireland (Dublin, 1678). Also see D.B. Quinn, ed., “The Bills and Statutes of the Irish Parliaments of Henry VII and Henry VIII,” Analecta Hibernica 10 (1941), pp. 71–169. Donal Cregan, “Irish Catholic Admissions to the English Inns of Court, 1558–1625,” Irish Jurist 5 (Summer, 1970) and “Irish Recusant Lawyers in Politics in the Reign of James I,” Irish Jurist 5

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29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

Jane Ohlmeyer (Winter, 1970); Jane Ohlmeyer, “Irish Recusant Lawyers During the Reign of Charles I” in A Kingdom in Crisis, ed. Ó Siochrú; Bríd McGrath, “Ireland and the Third University: Irish Men at the Inns of Court, 1603–1649” in Regions and Rulers in Ireland 1100–1650: Essays for Kenneth Nicholls, ed. D. Edwards (Dublin, 2004); and Hazel Maynard, “Irish Membership of the English Inns of Court, 1660–1699: Lawyers, Litigation and the Legal Profession,” unpublished PhD thesis, University College Dublin, 2006. Dougal Shaw, “Thomas Wentworth and Monarchial Ritual in Early Modern Ireland”, The Historical Journal, 49 (2006), pp. 331–55. For a vivid account of the pageantry laid on for Rinuccini upon his arrival in Kilkenny in November 1645, see C.P. Meehan, The Confederation of Kilkenny (Dublin, 1882), pp. 138–40; Edward McParland, “Building the Parliament House in Dublin,” Parliamentary History 21 (2002). Caldicott, “The Irish Parliament and the Etats du Languedoc”; Kearney, “The Irish Parliament”; Geoffrey Parker, “The Crisis of the Spanish and the Stuart Monarchies in the Mid-Seventeenth Century: Local Problems or Global Problems?” in British Interventions, ed. Brady and Ohlmeyer. For the later period, see The Irish Parliament in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Hayton, pp. 5–7 and S.J. Connolly, “Late Eighteenth-Century Irish Politics,” Parliamentary History 13 (1994). Moody, “The Irish Parliament,” p. 65. Hayton, ed., The Irish Parliament in the Eighteenth Century, p. 8. Before 1603 the parliament met in Dublin but also in Drogheda, Kilkenny, Cashel, Limerick, and Trim. Bradshaw, “The Beginnings of Modern Ireland,” p. 69. John McCavitt, Sir Arthur Chichester. Lord Deputy of Ireland 1605–16 (Belfast, 1998), chapter 11. The first session passed four statutes, the second passed twenty-six, the third passed twenty-three; and the fourth nineteen. Ten statutes related to the Graces, see H.F. Kearney, Strafford in Ireland, chapter 7. Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, chapter 3; McGrath, “The Irish Elections of 1640–41.” Dennehy, “Parliament in Ireland, 1661–6” and O’Donoghue, “Parliament in Ireland under Charles II.” On Poynings’ Law see D.B. Quinn, “The Early Interpretation of Poynings’ Law, 1494–1534,” IHS 2 (1941); T.W. Moody and R.D. Edwards, “The History of Poynings’ Law, Part I, 1494–1615,” IHS 8 (1941); Aidan Clarke, “The History of Poynings’ Law, 1615–1641,” IHS 18 (1972); Ó Siochrú, “Catholic Confederates”; Charles Ivar McGrath, “Government, Parliament and the Constitution: The Reinterpretation of Poynings’ Law, 1692–1714,” IHS, 2006); James Kelly, “Monitoring the Constitution: The Operation of Poynings’ Law in the 1760s” in The Irish Parliament and Monitoring the Constitution: Poynings’ Law and the Making of Law in Ireland, 1660–1800, ed. Hayton (Dublin, 2006).


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40. Constantia Maxwell, Irish History from Contemporary Sources (1509–1610) (London, 1923), pp. 101–2. 41. Quoted in Michael Perceval-Maxwell, “Ireland and the Monarchy in the Early Stuart Multiple Kingdom,” Historical Journal 34 (1991), p.285. 42. C.H. Williams, ed., English Historical Documents, ca.1485–1558 (London, 1967), p. 474. I am grateful to David Menarry for bringing this reference to my attention. 43. Also, as Bradshaw has reminded us that “in taking the title of king, Henry [VIII] had contracted an obligation to the whole of Ireland as his kingdom, and to all its inhabitants as his subjects. He was pledged, in effect, to the political unification of Ireland under the jurisdiction of the Crown,” Bradsahw. “The Beginnings of Modern Ireland,” p. 76. 44. As Arthur Williamson recently noted, after 1603 “The cultural assumptions of English constitutionalism could never allow for a Britain formulated as other than an expanded England.” Arthur Williamson, “Union with England Traditional, Union with England Radical: Sir James Hope and the Mid-Seventeenth-Century British State,” EHR 110 (1995), p. 307. 45. Clarke, Old English in Ireland, p. 151. Also see Bernadette Cunningham, “Representations of King, Parliament and the Irish People in Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn and John Lynch’s Cambrensis Eversus (1662”)” in Kingdom or Colony?, ed. Ohlmeyer. 46. For an excellent case study see Victor Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland 1616–1628: A Study in Anglo-Irish Politics (Dublin, 1998). 47. For the Boyles of Cork see Nicholas Canny, The Upstart Earl: A Study of the Social and Mental World of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, 1566–1643 (Cambridge, UK, 1982); Patrick Little, “The Earl of Cork and the Fall of the Earl of Strafford,” The Historical Journal 39, 3 (1996), “The Geraldine Ambitions of the First Earl of Cork,” Irish Historical Studies 23 (2002), “The First Unionists?: Irish Protestant Attitudes to Union with England, 1653–9,” Irish Historical Studies 32 (2000), “An Irish Governor of Scotland: Lord Broghill, 1655–6” in Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers ca.1600–1800, ed. A. Mackillop and Steve Murdoch (Leiden, 2003) and Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, 2004); and Toby Barnard and Jane Clark, eds., Lord Burlington. Architecture, Art and Life (London, 1995). For the Butlers of Ormond, see Thomas Carte, History of the Life of James, First Duke of Ormond, 2nd ed., 6 vols.(Oxford, 1851), see Lady Burghclere, The Life of James First Duke of Ormonde, 1610–1688, 2 vols.( London, 1912); J.C. Beckett, The Cavalier Duke: A Life of James Butler: 1st Duke of Ormond, 1610–1688 (Belfast, 1990); T.C. Barnard and Jane Fenlon, eds., The Dukes of Ormond, 1610–1745 (London, 2000); David Edwards, The Ormond Lordship in County Kilkenny, 1515–1642: The Rise and Fall of Butler Feudal Power (Dublin, 2000); William P. Kelly, “The Early Career of James Butler, Twelfth Earl, and First Duke of

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48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58.

59.

Jane Ohlmeyer Ormond (1610–1688), 1610–1643,” unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge, UK, 1994 and Eleanor O’Keefe, “The Family and Marriage Strategies of James Butler, First Duke of Ormonde, 1658–1688,” unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge, UK, 2000. Patrick Little, “Family and Faction: The Irish Nobility and the English Court, 1632–42, MLitt thesis, Trinity College, Dublin, 1992 and “ ‘Blood and Friendship’: The Earl of Essex’s Protection of the Earl of Clanricarde’s Interests, 1641–6,” EHR 112, 448 (1997); Jane Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: the Political Career of Randal MacDonnell First Marquis of Antrim (1609–83) (Cambridge, UK, 1993; paperback repr. Dublin, 2001). Anne Creighton, “The Catholic Interest in Irish Politics in the Reign of Charles II,” unpublished PhD thesis, Queens University, Belfast, 2002 and “The Remonstrance of December 1661 and Catholic Politics in Restoration Ireland,” IHS 34 (2004). Also see Neil Reynolds, “The Stuart Court and Courtiers in Exile 1644–54,” PhD thesis, Cambridge, UK, 1996); John Cronin is completing a doctoral dissertation at the European Institute in Florence on the Irish courtiers at the courts of Henrietta Maria and Charles II. The Old English have been meticulously researched by Aidan Clarke, see note 20 above and “Colonial Identity in Early Seventeenth Century Ireland” in Nationality and the Pursuit of National Independence; Historical Studies XI, ed. T.W. Moody (Belfast, 1978). For the figures, see McGrath, “The Membership of the Irish House of Commons, 1613–15.” John McCavitt, “An Unspeakable Parliamentary Fracas: The Irish House of Commons, 1613,” Analecta Hibernica 37 (1998) and Sir Arthur Chichester, pp. 182–89; Treadwell, “The House of Lords in the Irish Parliament of 1613–15”; and Maurice Lee, Jr., Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana, IL, 1990), pp. 220–23. M.K. Walsh, “Destruction by Peace”: Hugh O’Neill After Kinsale (Monaghan, 1986), p. 333. Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts Preserved in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth, 1515–1624, 6 vols. (London, 1867–73), 6, p. 290. By 1614, there were 108 Protestants and 102 Catholics. Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland. The bulk of creations dated from between 1617 and 1629 and included thirty-five nonresident peers, G.R. Mayes, “The Early Stuarts and the Irish Peerage,” EHR 73 (1958), pp. 231–32, 233 and Kearney, Strafford in Ireland, pp. 48–52. W. Knowler, ed., The Letters and Despatches, 2 vols. (London, 1739), 1, pp. 246, 240. Ohlmeyer, “The Irish Peers, Political Power and Parliament”; Bríd McGrath, “Parliament Men and the Confederate Association”; Clarke, “The Policies of the ‘Old English’ in Parliament.” Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, pp. 137–39.


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60. Clarke, “The Policies of the ‘Old English,’ ” p. 92. 61. Quoted in Clarke, “Colonial Constitutional Attitudes,” p. 359. 62. Confederate General Assemblies: 1st (October–November, 1642), 2nd (May–June, 1643), 3rd (November, 1643), 4th (June–July, 1644), 5th (May–September 1645), 6th (February–March 1646), 7th (January–April, 1647), 8th (November–December, 1647), and 9th (September, 1648–January, 1649). 63. Unfortunately most of the official records of the confederate Catholics, including the minutes of the supreme councils perished in the fire in the record office in 1711, but many of the documents and letters that they sent out have survived. 64. Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, p. 213. Also see Ohlmeyer, “Irish Recusant Lawyers.” 65. Cregan, “Confederation of Kilkenny.” 66. J.T. Gilbert, ed., History of the Irish Confederation and War in Ireland, 7 vols.(Dublin, 1882–91), II, pp. 74–75. 67. Aoife Duignan, “ ‘All in a Confused Opposition to Each Other’: Politics and War in Connacht, 1641–9,” unpublished PhD thesis, University College Dublin, 2006. 68. James, Lords of the Ascendancy, p. 35 and O’Donoghue, “Parliament in Ireland under Charles II,” p. 139; Dennehy, “Parliament in Ireland, 1661–6,” p. 59. 69. Sitting as the highest judicial authority in Ireland, the peers heard endless petitions from dispossessed and disgruntled landowners and often favored the “innocent papists” and prewar planters much to the fury of the Protestant newcomers who had settled in Ireland during the 1650s. 70. Irish Protestant lords relocated to England and, if they failed to secure an English title, stood for seats in the English House of Commons. 71. Creighton, “The Catholic Interest in Irish Politics.” 72. Kearney, “The Irish Parliament,” p. 88. 73. Ibid., p. 94. 74. Ibid. 75. Parker, “The Crisis of the Spanish and the Stuart Monarchies’ and Aidan Clarke, “Ireland and the General Crisis,” Past and Present 48 (1970). 76. Jacqueline Hill, “Ireland without Union: Molyneux and his Legacy” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, UK, 1995).

Further Readings (The most essentials works are marked with an asterisk [*].) *Brady Ciaran and Jane Ohlmeyer. Eds. British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, UK, 2005), especially the essays by Patrick Kelly, Bríd McGrath, and Micheál Ó Siochrú.

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*Clarke Aidan. The Old English in Ireland, 1625–42 (London and Ithaca, l966; paperback edition, Dublin, 2000). ———. “The Policies of the ‘Old English’ in Parliament, 1640–1” in Historical Studies V, ed. J.L. McCracken (London, 1965). *Farrell, Brian, ed., The Irish Parliamentary Tradition (Dublin and New York, 1973), especially the essays by Brendan Bradshaw, Donal Cregan, and Hugh Kearney. Hayton, David. Ed. The Irish Parliament in the Eighteenth Century: The Long Apprenticeship (Edinburgh, 2001). James, Francis G. Lords of the Ascendancy: The Irish House of Lords and its Members 1600–1800 (Dublin, 1995). *Moody, T.W. “The Irish Parliament under Elizabeth and James I: A General Survey,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Section C, 45 (1940 for 1938–40). Ó Siochrú, Micheál. Ed. Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s (Dublin, 2001), especially the essays by Bríd McGrath and Patrick Little. *Perceval-Maxwell, Michael. The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion (Dublin, 1994), *Simms, J.G. The Jacobite Parliament of 1689 (Dundalk, 1966).

Chapter 7

Repression and Representation: Political Culture in E arly Modern S candinavia K n u d J . V. J e s p e r s e n

Scandinavia—A general introduction Early modern Scandinavia was dominated by two state-formations. The kingdom of Sweden-Finland covered the eastern and northern part of the region, while the twin monarchy of Denmark-Norway dominated in its western and southern parts. Both states also controlled areas outside Scandinavia proper. Around 1600, Sweden was thus in the process of building an ever-increasing empire in the Eastern Baltic, while Denmark was the central part of a widespread empire that included Greenland, Iceland, Norway and possessions in northern Germany (figure 7.1). Before launching into a discussion of the very different political cultures in the two countries, it might be convenient briefly to point out a few basic similarities. In the first place, both state formations were multinational. In addition to the dominant Swedish population, Sweden also had within her borders Samis, Finns, and several Slavonic and German-speaking nations. Besides the Danes, the Danish empire also encompassed Inuits, Icelanders, Norwegians and a considerable German-speaking population. Like many other early modern states, the two Scandinavian kingdoms were conglomerate states with very mixed populations. Second, both states were, in a European context, periphery states, situated on the edge of Europe, and, compared with great powers like

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Figure 7.1 Map of Scandinavia.

P o l i t i c a l C u lt u r e : E a r ly M o d e r n S c a n d i n av i a 135

the Habsburg Empire and France, small and insignificant. Indeed, even the temporary great power status of Sweden in the seventeenth century was a rather short-lived phenomenon and due to the temporary weakness of her neighbors rather than to the inner strength of Sweden herself. Third, both Scandinavian states went through Lutheran Church reformations in the early sixteenth century and transformed permanently into secular Protestant societies. The Lutheran doctrine of subordination of the church to the secular state had a lasting impact on the political culture of both societies. Finally, it is worth noting that Denmark and Sweden were pretty similar as far as demography and economic life were concerned. In comparison with other western European countries they were thinly populated. It has thus been estimated that the enormous area of Sweden-Finland had a total population of only 1.3 million around 1600, slowly increasing to a couple of million in the course of the eighteenth century. Of these, more than 90 per cent were farmers or people who earned their livelihood from agriculture-related occupations. The urban population accounted for just a small percent, while the nobility and the clergy made up for only a single-digit percent of the total population. A similar picture emerges as far as Denmark-Norway is concerned. The total population was about the same size as that of SwedenFinland. Nearly 85 percent of the population consisted of farmers or fishermen, while the urban population accounted for about 10 percent. The remaining 5 percent was made up of nobility and clergy. The nobility, just a tiny fraction of the total population, completely dominated the political and economic life of the region until the Absolutist Revolution of 1660. One striking difference between the two states, however, also deserves to be emphasized: their very dissimilar political history both in relation to the outside world and domestically. It is a well-known fact that the years around 1600 were crucial in the history of European state formation. Medieval universalism was rapidly collapsing, while secular states took over, thus permanently changing the political map of Europe and the political cultures in the new, secular states themselves. The emerging state formations struggled with all possible means to win places for themselves and, in this process, to distinguish themselves politically and culturally from their neighbors. This transformation provoked a great wave of wars in the Scandinavian region also. The very different fates of the two Scandinavian powers in the seventeenth century were products of this great process of modernization.

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Denmark and Sweden had been rivals at least since the final dissolution of the Kalmar Union in 1523 and they fought each other bitterly over the next two centuries, when periods of frosty peace were frequently interrupted by open war. From the beginning of the Nordic Seven Years’ War in 1563 until the end of the Great Northern War in 1720, the two countries were actually at open war for twenty-nine years—almost for one fifth of the total period. The central issue of this apparently endless conflict was that the young Vasa state wanted recognition as a sovereign state, while Denmark hoped to reestablish the old Union under the leadership of the Danish king. The rivalry soon crystallized in the question of Dominium maris Baltici—that is, who should control the Baltic Sea, the key to controlling the entire Scandinavian region. In order to achieve that goal, Sweden, recognizing Denmark’s initial superiority at sea, chose an indirect approach: a systematic policy of expansion in the Eastern Baltic. Denmark, on her side, sought to exploit her maritime superiority and her position as the gatekeeper nation of the Baltic to isolate Sweden from the outside world. The final outcome of this century-long struggle was that, by the mid-seventeenth century, Sweden stood as the victorious party and even for some decades enjoyed the status of one of the great powers of Europe, while defeated Denmark lost about one-third of her territory to Sweden, as well as her former status as the leading power of Scandinavia. In the end, however, the defeat of Sweden in the Great Northern War (1700–21) gave way to a new equilibrium between the two countries—now both reduced to small powers—and the status of the Baltic Sea changed from being a closed mare nostrum to becoming an open mare liberum. This outcome—victorious Sweden versus defeated Denmark—was due to many factors, but can, to some extent, be explained by the dissimilar political structures in the two societies. The Swedish system proved, in the long run, much more able to mobilize resources for war than its Danish counterpart. One important reason for this was the Swedish leadership’s successful solution to the problem of political representation and popular participation in political decision making even of a controversial and burdensome nature. Conversely, in Denmark the problem of the lack of popular coresponsibility for the leadership’s policy remained unsolved. This brings me to the central issue of this chapter: a comparison of the political culture—or the culture of politics—in the two countries during the crucial seventeenth century. I shall discuss the two countries separately and, in conclusion, try to compare them. This


comparison may also contribute toward explaining, in a wider perspective, the very different historical experiences of the two Scandinavian countries.1

Political Culture and Representation in Denmark The constitutional history of Denmark can roughly be divided into three main stages: the elective monarchy until 1660, the era of absolutism 1660–1848, and the representative, or parliamentarian, democracy from 1848 to the present. Only the two first of these stages are under discussion here. Until 1660, Denmark was an elective monarchy, or a diarchy, in which all political power rested with the king and an aristocratic state council of ten to twenty members. The division of power between the two bodies was defined by the coronation charter signed by the newly elected king at his accession. This charter, issued by the state council, described in many details the limits of the king’s executive power. Formally, the system certainly had elements of both election and representation, but it would be a misrepresentation to call it a representative one in the modern sense of the word. In theory, the people could certainly choose their king freely, but in practice only the state council decided—and it always elected the eldest son of the deceased king. In order to safeguard his legitimacy, the newly elected king had to have his election confirmed by the landsting (regional popular assemblies). This confirmation might be interpreted as an element of limited popular participation in the elective process, even if in a rather formal sense. Actually, we do not know of a single case in which these popular assemblies refused to confirm a king-elect. Nor can it be said that the state council was a true representation of the popular will. The members of this powerful body were successively appointed by the king, and his candidates always came from the same ten to twelve influential aristocratic families, representing only a tiny, but extremely influential, minority of the landed nobility. This highly exclusive political structure can be illustrated by figure 7.2. The early modern constitutional system was, in other words, a highly aristocratic one, effectively excluding any broader popular representation from the political leadership. However, it mirrored with great accuracy the prevailing socioeconomic realities in society at large. Around 1600, Danish society was still a rather rigid society of Estates, where privileges defined the rights and duties of the different estates according to their respective roles in society. The workability of such a

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King

State Council

State Power

Nobility Society Clergy

Burghers

Peasants Figure 7.2 Sociopolitical Structure of Danish Society, ca. 1600.

system depended precisely upon the proper maintenance of this legal inequality among the estates. In economic terms, the structure can be illustrated as shown in figure 7.3. Essentially, the Danish production system was agrarian and centered on the large estates of the crown and the nobility. The crown owned about 44 percent of all arable land, while 50 percent was owned by the nobility. This left only 6 percent for freeholders. The peasantry—nearly all copyholders on the estates of the crown and the nobility—contributed with their work and their rents to the economy of the large estates, where the overwhelming part of the agrarian production took place. The surplus production from those estates was handled by the tradesmen in the towns, whose privileges allowed them to buy and sell. Each estate—the peasants, the nobility, and the burghers—was thus allocated its well-defined function in the economy, and privileges were drawn up accordingly. The most important role of state power was to preserve the legal differentiation that was the essential precondition for the smooth working of the system. This is indicated on the sketch by the umbrella at the top. In a society like this, there was no need for representative institutions—only for controlling bodies to secure the maintenance of privileges. In other words, the system was effective as long as the state

P o l i t i c a l C u lt u r e : E a r ly M o d e r n S c a n d i n av i a 139 State Power Labor Peasants

Rents

Estates

Surplus

Townspeople

Production

Figure 7.3 Model of the Danish Economic System, ca. 1600.

power continued in its role of night watchman and avoided burdening the citizens with regular taxes. And those preconditions were fulfilled as long as the government was able to live from its own resources, that is, to finance its activities with its own revenue from crown land and customs. In such a stable situation, there was, in fact, a high degree of congruity between the socioeconomic realities in society and the aristocratic form of government. However, that balance changed dramatically with Denmark’s active involvement in the Thirty Years’ War from 1625 and the devastating wars with Sweden in the following decades. The rapidly increasing military expenditure required regular direct taxation on a hitherto unprecedented scale, and this left the state council with a painful dilemma: the council, as the guardian of state interests, was, on one hand, forced to levy regular taxes, including from their formerly taxexempt fellow nobles, thereby slowly but surely undermining their own constituency. On the other hand, the heavier taxation also caused growing unrest among the nonnoble estates and generated demands from their side for some sort of political influence giving them a say in decision making relating to state expenditure and the distribution of taxes. In other words, replacing the old domain-state by the new tax-state generated an entirely new political agenda in Denmark: a widespread demand for political reforms implying a measure of political representation of the hitherto inarticulate groups of the population. An important step in this direction was taken in 1627 with the revival of the Assembly of the Estates—an almost forgotten constitutional instrument—with representatives from all estates in society. This revival of an ancient representative body gradually eroded the otherwise sovereign position of the state council, caught as it was between the self-interest of its fellow nobles and its overall responsibility for the state. And after the disastrous wars of 1657–60 with Sweden and the bankruptcy that followed of the state finances, the old political system finally collapsed and gave way to the absolutist revolution that

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made the monarchy hereditary and replaced the old diarchy with a monolithic absolutist constitution that would last for 189 years. Paradoxically, this revolution was only made possible because the nonnoble sections of the Assembly of Estates allied with the king and actively assisted him in outmaneuvering the discredited state council, forcing it, first to recognize the king as a hereditary monarch and, second, to scrap the coronation charter, the real basis of the council’s power. These steps left the road to absolutism and the subsequent suspension of all popular political influence wide open. The new regime rapidly consolidated its position by implementing a clear-cut hierarchical power structure with the absolutist king at the top, from where all political power radiated. Responsible only to God, the king thus became the sole legitimate interpreter of the general will and the only instrument of political power. The Danes, then, had to wait until 1835 before a popular voice reentered the political stage, when—under the influence of the democratic revolutions in Europe—Assemblies of the Estates were finally called up again. The popular discourse generated by these assemblies led directly to the downfall of absolutism in 1848 and its substitution by a democratic constitution. Looking back, it is rather obvious that the state council—and thus the diarchy—fell in 1660 because of the lack of an adequate representative system. Certainly, this aristocratic assembly always insisted on representing the entire population vis-à-vis the king, but—as the crisis grew deeper and the burden of taxation increased during the first half of the seventeenth century—it became more and more evident that the council was not even representative of the privileged nobility, whose rank-and-file members turned against it in ever-increasing numbers. This resulted in paralysis and, finally, in the total collapse of the state council. It is only fair to add, however, that the introduction of absolutism hardly influenced the daily life of the common people to any great extent. Nor is there any indication that the new regime violated the traditional local networks that for many centuries had regulated social life and the solving of conflicts in the villages under the night watchman regime of the diarchy. Rather the opposite was the case. In spite of many bombastic proclamations to the opposite effect, Danish absolutism was far from being totalitarian in the modern sense of the word. This became obvious with the issuing of the regime’s great law book in 1683, The Danish Law. The unlimited power of the regime was indeed heavily emphasized in the introduction to this comprehensive law book, but it clearly appeared from its many clauses


that the government had no intention of intervening in the domestic lives of local communities or in conflicts within the sphere of private law. Only when such conflicts ended in deadlock would the official machinery of justice reluctantly step in. Of course, this laissez-faire attitude was mainly dictated by necessity—the regime simply lacked the means for a close surveillance of the citizens—but, at the same time, it left plenty of scope for practicing the ancient grassroots democracy grown out of the old village communities that eventually— at the end of the absolutist era—became instrumental in the opposition movement leading to the downfall of the regime in 1848. With a certain degree of goodwill, it is thus possible to trace the enduring existence of a quite vital political culture at grassroots level in Denmark, which guaranteed a fairly high degree of popular selfmanagement, even under the absolutist regime. This is not to deny, however, that both under the diarchy and in the era of absolutism, Denmark lacked the formal representative institutions that might have served as channels of communication between the common people and those in power. In the end, this communication barrier cost both types of regime their lives, and, in the crucial years in the midseventeenth century, when the rivalry with Sweden reached a climax, this lack of communication paralyzed the political leadership and left Denmark a loser in the power struggle. This reflection brings me to take a short look at the Swedish constitutional system that in many respects differed from its Danish counterpart.2

Political Culture and Representation in Sweden As already mentioned, early modern Danish society was a society of Estates ruled by an elitist aristocratic—later on absolutist— government. In contrast to this, Sweden was a state of Estates with a well-developed representative political system. All the Estates, including the peasants, were represented in the riksdag (a sort of national parliament), thus allowing them to be heard at the highest political level. In a highly simplified form, the development of the political system can be described as in figure 7.4. As can be seen, the development ran through three quite distinct phases: first, the monarchia mixta until 1680, in which the king, together with the aristocratic state council, exercised executive power but had regularly to listen to the opinions of the riksdag; second, the era of absolutism 1680–1719, in which the king succeeded in eliminating the state council and thus stood alone vis-à-vis the riksdag, whose role was an advisory one; and

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1) Monarchia Mixta, 1611–80

King

Council

The Diet (Four Estates)

Administration

2) Absolutism, 1680–1719

The Diet (Four Estates)

King

Administration

3) The Age of Freedom, ca. 1719

King

Diet

Council

Administration Figure 7.4 The Swedish Constitutional System in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.

third, the so-called Era of Freedom after 1719, when a monarchy in crisis had been pushed back by the riksdag that had also taken upon itself many executive functions in addition to its legislative power. In the present context it is worth noticing that the riksdag, with its broad, popular representation, remained as a permanent institution


throughout and also that its political influence increased rather than decreased. In contrast to Denmark, the Swedish constitution thus included a permanent system of popular political representation at the highest political level, through which the rulers and the ruled could communicate. This particular development has two explanations, a political one and a socioeconomic one. The political explanation takes us back to the very genesis of the Vasa state. When, in 1523, Gustav Vasa dissolved the old union with Denmark, it was a truly revolutionary step, and in the eyes of many observers, Swedish as well as foreigners, the new Swedish leader was just another pretender without much legitimacy to support his claim. His answer to that assumption was to try to demonstrate to the world that his claim to the Swedish throne was supported by the Swedish people. At that point the riksdag entered the scene. In his early years, Gustav Vasa regularly resorted to popular assemblies for support, and, at an important meeting with the Estates of the Realm in Västerås in 1544, he made a positive contract with the people: the meeting proclaimed Gustav Vasa the hereditary king of Sweden, while he, in return, recognized the permanent existence of the riksdag, promising to consult it on a regular basis on important state matters. King and people thus entered a permanent agreement: the riksdag fully recognized the legitimacy of Gustav Vasa, while the people achieved a right to permanent representation through the riksdag. From then on, the king as well as the people—as represented in the riksdag—constituted requisite elements in Swedish political life, and the political system was thus defined as a monarchia mixta. In socioeconomic terms, Sweden was rather different from Denmark. To a far greater extent than in Denmark, arable land was farmed by freeholders, who owned their own small farmsteads; actually, more than half of the arable farmland was owned and cultivated by this group, compared with only 6 percent in Denmark. In contrast to the Danish peasantry, Swedish freeholders were a political force that no Swedish king could afford to ignore. Conversely, members of the Swedish nobility were in general poorer and less influential than their Danish counterparts, and they also counted less in political terms. These facts, added to Gustav Vasa’s need for legitimacy, explain why the common rural population was well represented in the riksdag from the very outset and, in this capacity, able to exert a marked influence on state politics. Furthermore, this smoothly working representative system explains why, in general, Sweden could boast a much more active and responsible political culture than Denmark could. In contrast to the Danish

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peasantry, Swedish peasant society felt responsible for the state’s affairs and, therefore, was also willing to make far greater sacrifices in emergencies. This proved decisive when, from about 1560, the Swedish state came under heavy pressure from the almost permanent state of war between Sweden and her neighbors. Unlike the Danish monarch, the Swedish king was rather poor and, from an early date, he therefore had to build up an efficient system for levying taxes and conscripting soldiers. This was done with great skill, and thus the systematic building up of the Swedish military state, with its well-functioning administration and control systems of unprecedented efficiency, had already begun around 1560. Over a few decades, this great process of political and administrative modernization transformed Sweden from a backward peasant society into one of the most advanced and efficient military states in early modern Europe. That the Swedish leadership succeeded in implementing so many reforms so rapidly, without facing widespread popular protest, can most probably be ascribed to the already existing representative political system that kept open the channels of communication between rulers and ruled and guaranteed a high degree of consensus about even controversial and burdensome political matters. Thus, in conclusion, the Swedish constitutional model—born in the first place as an instrument of survival in a hostile world—must be regarded as a necessary precondition for the administrative modernization that, over a few decades, changed Sweden from a poor, oldfashioned state into a modern great power. This original model, with its mix of paternal government, on one hand, and the idea of popular representation and shared responsibility, on the other, has left a lasting mark on political life in Sweden.3

Conclusion: Denmark versus Sweden This brings me to the conclusion of my comparative reflections on political culture and popular representation in Scandinavia. I hope to have made it clear that Denmark and Sweden, already from the early sixteenth century, followed paths leading in very different directions. In Denmark, the alliance between the king and the state council succeeded, from an early date, in excluding the Estates from political influence and thus in blocking political communication between the rulers and the ruled. However, the price for this successful monopolizing of power proved to be high. When, by the early seventeenth century, it became urgent to modernize the administration and increase the tax


revenue under the pressure of war, this turned out to be almost impossible, because of the many private interests involved and the lack of general political consensus about the government’s policy. An absolutist revolution was actually needed to break the deadlock. In Sweden, by contrast, a sophisticated system of political representation and participation emerged from an early date, generating an active political culture that turned the Swedish peasantry into coowners of the Swedish project. This proved to be an important asset in building up the advanced Swedish military state and, later on, the Swedish great power. Also, the advanced culture of representation helps us to explain the general acceptance of the heavy human and economic burdens that the Swedish people had to endure during Sweden’s age of greatness. Indeed, the success of the Swedish process of modernization was deeply rooted in the nature of her political system. Against this background, it seems fairly safe to conclude that Sweden won the struggle with Denmark for mastery in the Baltic basically because the war increasingly became an asymmetrical affair. It became more and more an unequal confrontation between an effectively modernized Sweden and a still old-fashioned Denmark, whose political life had hardened in a form that excluded ninety-nine percent of the people from political influence. Therefore, when the need arose, the government proved unable to mobilize the necessary resources and gain popular support for its steps. In this light, the final outcome of the confrontation was hardly surprising: Denmark lost, because her leaders had ignored the need for political reform far too long. Sweden won, essentially because her political system from an early date was geared to matching the active foreign policy of the Swedish leadership.

Notes 1. For a general introduction to the early modern Scandinavian societies, see John P. Maarbjerg, Scandinavia in the European World-Economy, ca. 1570–1625. Some Local Evidence of Economic Integration (New York, 1995). For a discussion of the political systems in Denmark and Sweden, see A Revolution from Above. The Power State of 16th and 17th Century Scandinavia, ed. Leon Jespersen (Odense, 2001). The rivalry between Denmark and Sweden and its corollary is discussed in two articles by Knud J.V. Jespersen, “Rivalry without Victory. Denmark, Sweden and the Struggle for the Baltic, 1500–1720”, in In Quest of Trade and Security. The Baltic in Power Politics, 1500–1890, ed. Göran Rystad, Klaus R. Böhme, Wilhelm M. Carlgren (Lund, 1994), pp. 137–76, and “Warfare and Society in the Baltic, 1500–1800,” in

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European Warfare, 1453–1815, ed. Jeremy Black (London, 1999), pp. 180–200. 2. The most recent introduction to Danish history after 1500 is Knud J.V. Jespersen, A History of Denmark (London, 2004). The role of the nobility in the country’s political and economic life is discussed in further detail in my article, “The Rise and Fall of the Danish Nobility, 1600–1800,” in The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. H.M. Scott (London, 1995), pp. 2, 41–70, while the nature of Danish absolutism is discussed in my article, “Absolute Monarchy in Denmark: Change and Continuity,” The Scandinavian Journal of History 12 (1987), pp. 307–16. See also the work by Leon Jespersen, mentioned in note 1, for a more detailed discussion of the constitutional system before 1660. The preconditions and impact of the two revolutions—Lutheran in 1536 and absolutist in 1660—that permanently changed the political landscape in early modern Denmark, are discussed in further detail by E. Ladewig Petersen and Knud J.V. Jespersen, “Two Revolutions in Early Modern Denmark,” in Politics and Society in Reformation Europe. Essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. E.I. Kouri and Tom Scott (London, 1987), pp. 473–501. 3. While Danish scholars have traditionally discussed the early modern Danish constitution from a top-down perspective—and thereby tended to ignore possible representative aspects—modern Swedish research into the Swedish constitution has to a much larger extent applied a bottom-up perspective, thus stressing popular participation and representative aspects. This lopsidedness in scholarly traditions may also have unintentionally influenced the description in the present chapter. For a good assessment of the modern scholarly debate in Sweden, see John P. Maarbjerg’s article, “Sweden, the First Modern State,” Scandinavian Studies, 76 (2004), pp. 385–418. Sweden’s road to great power status in the seventeenth century and the factors determining it are sketched out by Klaus-Richard Böhme, “Building a Baltic Empire. Aspects of Swedish Expansion, 1560–1660,” in In Quest of Trade, eds. Göran Rystad et al., pp. 177–220.

Further Readings While Danish scholars have traditionally discussed the early modern Danish constitution from a top-down perspective—and thereby tended to ignore possible representative aspects—modern Swedish research into the Swedish constitution has to a much larger extent applied a bottom-up perspective, thus stressing popular participation and representative aspects. This lopsidedness in scholarly traditions may also have unintentionally influenced the description in the present chapter. For a good assessment of the modern scholarly debate in


Sweden, see John P. Maarbjerg’s article, “Sweden, the First Modern State,” Scandinavian Studies 76 (2004), pp. 385–418. Sweden’s road to great power status in the seventeenth century, and the factors determining it, are sketched out by Kaus-Richard Böhme, in “Building a Baltic Empire: Aspects of Swedish Expansion, 1560–1660,” in In Quest of Trade, eds. Göran Rystad et al., pp. 177–220.

Select Bibliography Jespersen, Knud J.V. A History of Denmark. London, 2004. Jespersen, Leon. Ed. A Revolution from Above. The Power State of 16th and 17th Century Scandinavia. Odense, 2001. Maarbjerg, John P. Scandinavia in the European World-Economy, ca. 1570–1625. Some Local Evidence of Economic Integration. New York, 1995. Maarbjerg. “Sweden, the First Modern State,” Scandinavian Studies 76 (2004), pp. 385–418. Rystad, Göran et al. Eds. In Quest of Trade and Security. The Baltic in Power Politics, 1500–1890. Lund, 1994.


Chapter 8

An U nbal anced R epresentation: The Nature and Functions of the C ortes of Castile in the Habsburg Period (1538–1698) José Ignacio For tea Pérez

T

he Cortes of Castile have long been a forgotten issue in Spanish historiography. For many historians the Cortes, like the Castilian city councils, were one of the first casualties of the consolidation of royal absolutism. The Catholic kings (Ferdinand and Isabella), at the end of the fifteenth century, and Charles V immediately afterwards, would have put an end to an institution that would have reached modern times in a considerably weakened state. The failure of the great revolt of the Comuneros against royal authority in 1521 would have marked, according to this interpretation, the end of the liberties of Castile. So much so that the Russian historian Vladimir Piskorski, writing on the Cortes of Castile at the end of the nineteenth century,1 finished his influential book on the subject precisely in 1521, because he considered that beyond that date the institution had lost the autonomy it had had in the past with respect to royal authority.2 Nevertheless, historians have realized that the institution played a very important role in the financing of the Habsburg Monarchy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and consequently considerable research has been done on the Cortes of Castile over the last thirty years. As a result, their meaning within the contemporary Castilian political

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system is now more clearly understood. Our knowledge of the institution, however, is still somewhat incomplete and unbalanced. With this in mind let me now reflect on three main questions. What was the legal and institutional framework of the assembly? How was the representation of the kingdom in the Cortes implemented? And finally, what were their functions and how did these functions evolve? * * * With respect to the first question, the legislation of the kingdom included two laws that defined the nature and functions of the Cortes of Castile. One of them, promulgated in 1367, established “that neither taxes nor tributes are to be levied throughout the kingdom without summoning the Cortes and their being awarded by the proctors.” The second, issued in 1419, ordered that “on the great and arduous matters, Cortes must be summoned and the advice of the three estates of our realm must be sought, as was done by the kings our ancestors.”3 The laws of the kingdom, therefore, expressly delimited a specific area of competence for the Cortes in the first of the rules cited, whereas in the second they broadened it without being truly specific, since nothing was effectively decided concerning who was qualified to determine what were the “great and arduous themes,” whose solution required the summoning of the three estates of the kingdom in Cortes, nor what it was that they had to encompass. The legislation was, in this way, not only brief, but also ambiguous in important aspects regarding the Cortes of Castile, and more so, given that the way in which the institutional profile of the Castilian assembly had been set up during the Middle Ages was also vague. Although the kings, for example, had always considered the Cortes as the ideal place in which to negotiate with the kingdom those matters that most interested them at any given time, also always kept open the possibility of doing so by summoning specific estates or corporations to consultative assemblies of a more restricted nature. At least they did so until the sixteenth century. The procedures governing the Cortes when the kingdom was summoned were not too well defined either. The sovereigns, for example, could call the three estates to Cortes in accordance with the contents of the law to which I referred earlier, and indeed that is what they did on a great many occasions.4 Normal practice in these cases was that each estate deliberated separately, but nothing prevented the holding of joint sessions if they were so authorized. On the other hand, the representatives of the kingdom, together or separately, could be consulted on any matter. Issues of a fiscal nature, however, took on singular importance

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and in those cases it was common for only the proctors of the cities to negotiate. Nevertheless, there was no existing rule whatsoever in this case to prevent the three estates from meeting in joint sessions to deliberate on finance, if the king considered it convenient. Throughout the fifteenth century the tendency was to limit the summons to Cortes to the representatives of the cities. But, determining the number of urban corporations that had the right or the privilege to be summoned to the sessions, or of proctors who could represent them therein, was a matter settled only slowly. It was not established until 1429 that no more than two proctors per city could be sent, and even in 1465 the king was requested to limit to seventeen, the number of cities able to attend the Cortes. Later, the limit would be raised to eighteen with the inclusion of Grenada, and increased again in 1625, 1650, and 1660 with the incorporation of three additional votes, the first corresponding to the set of Galician cities, the second to that of the cities of Extremadura and the third to Palencia. Thus, an assembly was finally made up in which a maximum of twenty-one cities and forty-two proctors could attend. In comparison with its equivalents in other European monarchies, it was a very small chamber. It must be taken into account, however, that according to the political traditions of Castile, the decisions taken by the Cortes on matters within their scope needed the additional approval of the cities. That was true until 1632. Thus, any negotiations between the crown and the proctors in Cortes were drawn out in the councils (regimientos) of the cities that sent those proctors. There was no common rule established at any time for all of the cities concerning how their proctors in Cortes were chosen.5 The three methods generally used—the election, the rota, or the drawing of lots—were expressly sanctioned by the laws of the kingdom. Legislation also prohibited the sale of proxies or their transfer, but there can be no doubt that these practices were deeply rooted and tolerated. On the other hand, the king was legally allowed, in case of need, to waive certain requirements for the proctors, such as those of age or residence, and he was even given the power to settle6 conflicts that might arise in the cities during the application of the selection process used. That does not mean, of course, that we must assume royal interference in the functioning of the Castilian Cortes at all times and under all circumstances. Indeed, although that seems to have been relatively common at the end of the fifteenth century, this royal meddling tapered off considerably in the 1500s, and only began to increase again at certain times toward the turn of the century.7 Nevertheless, it seems obvious that the electoral proceedings and the generalization of certain attitudes with respect to

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the proctors—transfer or sale of proxies, the internal procedures of the Cortes that demanded deliberations be kept secret, and customs such as conceding to the proctors help with expenses (ayudas de costa) in the course of the sessions and so on—gradually led to the disturbing realization in the cities that they did not really control their representatives. From the end of the sixteenth century, the cities with a vote in Cortes had a marked mistrust in their proctors and it is reflected in the political works of the age.8 The problems existing between aldermen and proctors were one particular aspect of a more general struggle between the cities and the Cortes. Fundamentally, the former preferred to view everything from a local perspective. They identified themselves with the problems of their own community and it was from this point of view that they were willing to discuss general matters of the kingdom submitted for their consideration. Obviously, the attitude of the crown was very different, always tending to put the welfare of the kingdom ahead of particular local interests. This policy, however, was not without difficulties. It brought with it the risk that the Cortes, as an assembly of the whole realm, could be reinforced in relation to the cities, and the urban councils were not willing to allow this. It is within this context that long-established parliamentary practices in Castile are to be understood, emphasizing that the agreements the proctors arrived at in the Cortes on matters for the consideration of the kingdom were merely consultative in character, and ultimately had to be ratified by a decisive vote in the respective city councils. Since the crown was interested in having the proctors attend the Cortes with full decision-making powers (plena potestas), and pressed the cities to gain them, the wording of the powers with which the proctors were to be invested became a matter of the greatest political importance.9 Free powers, drafted by the king’s council itself seem to have been awarded by the cities to their proctors from the beginning of the sixteenth century. By 1520 the crown had consolidated its position on this point. Nevertheless, the cities continued to resist the Crown pressure by adding restrictive orders to the theoretically free powers or by demanding that their proctors obey instructions and swear oaths that nothing outside of the very ordinary would be decided without prior consultation of the respective councils. In this way, each summoning of Cortes gave rise to a tug-of-war between the cities and the crown over the extent of the powers of the proctors. Although the crown normally managed to make the cities take back their instructions and lift the oaths on their proctors, until 1632 the really important decisions continued to be submitted for the obligatory approval of the


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councils. The distinction between the decisive vote of the cities and the consultative vote of the Cortes must not be interpreted as merely the fruit of the mistrust of the proctors by their councils, but as an expression of the decided will to underline the preeminence of the cities over the Cortes. This in itself reveals the kind of political articulation existing in Castile and says a great deal about the true nature of its representative institutions.10 * * * It seems obvious, then, that the Habsburgs inherited a parliamentary system in which the uses, customs and long-established practices weighed much more heavily than the rules defining the procedures and functions of the Cortes. Nevertheless, the Habsburgs took new measures that are supposed to have been of far-reaching significance for the future of the institution. One of the most noteworthy was that of no longer summoning the nobility and the clergy to the meetings of the kingdom, a decision which, as is well known, Charles V took at the end of the Cortes of Toledo in 1538–39. Many contemporaries and a number of historians have considered that the desired aim of the crown at that time was to confirm royal authority and weaken the position of the kingdom, believing that little resistance could be made to royal demands if the representative institutions of Castile were deprived of such fundamental support as that lent by the two privileged estates of the kingdom. According to this interpretation the cities would have been incapable from that moment of filling the vacuum created by the definitive distancing of the nobility and clergy from the Cortes, thus providing a clear path to the triumph of royal absolutism in Castile. Historians have generally attributed the reason for the crown’s taking this action to the stubborn refusal of the Castilian aristocracy to concede the general excise (sisa general) requested from the kingdom. Whether this measure was novel and radical, however, is doubtful for a number of reasons. First, it had many precedents in the fifteenth century. Emperor Charles himself called the nobility and the clergy to Cortes on only two of the ten occasions on which the kingdom was summoned during the first twenty years of his reign. There is no reason, therefore, to dramatize the consequences of an action which, in view of its antecedents, could hardly be considered extraordinary and which could be perceived as definitive only in the long run. Second, neither was it the first time that Charles V had had to admit the refusal by the Cortes to pay a similar subsidy. In fact, in 1527 the emperor had to resign himself to

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the rejection of a similar petition for excise by the nobility. Ten years later, in 1537, it had been the proctors of the cities, the only ones summoned to the Cortes held at that time. They turned it down once more. Moreover, several sources coincide in pointing out the fact that in the months before the convening of the Cortes of Toledo that year, the opinion was very widespread amongst the royal councilors that it was not advisable to summon all three estates of the kingdom to approve a general excise.11 Third, that measure was taken after bitter negotiations in which the crown was criticized by the nobility for its authoritarianism and for the high cost of its foreign policy. Fourth, the failure to summon the nobility to Cortes any longer did not mean that negotiations with them in less compromising places were abandoned. Negotiating separately with the different estates of the kingdom seemed less dangerous to the royal ministers than doing so with all of them together in Cortes. And last but not least, although it is true that in Toledo, the emperor obtained from the cities alternative resources that he had been denied by the nobility, this was at the cost of a compromise that began then and culminated years later by virtue of which the kingdom would concede two subsidies to the king every three years in exchange for an extension of the agreement on the sales taxes (encabezamiento general of the alcabalas) that he had negotiated with the cities a few years earlier, in 1536.12 In other words, the need to count on the support of the cities led the emperor to negotiate with them a system of taxation in which the Cortes would end up occupying a central position that they had not previously enjoyed. There are reasons to believe that the decision not to summon the nobility any longer does not say so much about the strength of the king or his wish to alter the parliamentary traditions of Castile, as it does about his incapacity to force the hand of the aristocracy. When viewed together with the remaining measures that were adopted at that time, it must be concluded that the action taken in 1538–39 was not aimed at the weakening of the Cortes. The interpretation of the consequences this move had on the representation of the kingdom is more controversial. Surprising as it may seem, the fact that the nobility and the clergy were no longer summoned to the meetings of the kingdom had failed to raise much controversy among contemporaries. It is true that as the fiscal pressure was raised by the crown, and the contribution to the maintenance costs of the empire by those exempt was increasingly perceived as necessary, voices were periodically heard calling for the need to seek their consent, as had happened in the case of the cities. The clergy posed this question, for example, in 1594,13 when the flour tax was debated in Cortes, and then again in 1629,14 during the negotiations for the


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renewal of the subsidy of the so-called eighteen millones. Also, although the truth of the accusation is not at all clear, something similar occurred in 1631, at a highly delicate time, when Philip IV had tried to impose a tax on salt.15 Again in 1656, a serious crisis arose in the relations between the Monarchy and the Church for this reason.16 Nevertheless, everything seems to indicate that the clergy did not so much seek to be summoned to Cortes in the old manner but rather to be consulted in their own assemblies (congregaciones). These, as indicated in the correspondence of the papal nuncio at the end of the 1650s, were already being called by the highly descriptive name Corti ecclesiastiche, as opposed to the true Cortes themselves, which were called Corti secolari. With respect to the relations between king and church, at least in fiscal matters, the real problem was not representation but consent, and this could be expressed in different places.17 Be that as it may, the Cortes of Castile would often be summoned by the kings between 1516, when Charles V arrived in Spain, and 1664, when the last Cortes summoned by the Habsbourgs in Castile came to an end. In total, there were forty-one sessions during this period. They also underwent considerable institutional development at that time.18 They were given a president and a certain number of royal officials to advise him in his office. Some special commissions—the so-called Junta de Cortes and the Junta de Asistentes—were also established for the same advisory purpose. From 1532 the presidents of the Cortes were also those of the Council of Castile. When the Junta de Cortes was created some years later, King Philip II ordered that the presidents of the Councils of Finance, the Indies, and Orders attend the new commission, an indication of the growing interest the crown had in the Cortes. In the same year the kingdom itself tried to create its own body of ministers. It also decided to ask permission to develop privative institutions. In 1525, for example, Charles V authorized the establishment of a Diputación del Reino which, after 1544, was made up of three members designated by the cities. The functions of this new institution were first to monitor the fulfillment of the agreements reached between king and kingdom. When the general encabezamiento of the alcabalas was approved, the Diputación extended its functions and began to take responsibility for certain aspects of its administration. From then on, only the representatives of cities (encabezadas) could form part of the institution, a fact that would have great significance for its future. Most importantly, the Diputación represented the kingdom in the periods between sessions (hueco de Cortes) and had the privilege of consulting the king directly. Finally, the granting of the millones subsidies in 1611 led to the creation of a specific Comisión, which, at the outset, was

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solely composed of proctors of the cities, but to which an equal number of royal ministers was added in 1638. It succeeded in becoming a supreme court of justice in millones matters before being integrated in the Council of Finance in 1658. The creation of the Comisión de Millones established a de facto duality in the representative institutions of the kingdom, taking into account the prior existence of the Diputación. Not surprisingly, a stubborn rivalry rapidly arose between the two institutions. The Cortes nevertheless had no legislative powers, not because they had been deprived of them but because they had never had them, yet they achieved the function and status of a privileged forum for debating those problems that troubled the kingdom, enabling them to greatly influence the way in which they were solved. This is shown by the numerous laws incorporated into the Nueva Recopilación that were inspired by proposals of the proctors of Cortes in fields such as economic regulation, the organization of municipal government, the administration of justice, and the defense of the royal against ecclesiastical jurisdiction, among others.19 Nevertheless, it is also obvious that the marginalization of the nobility and the clergy forced diverse adjustments in the strategies of the excluded estates in their relations with the crown, tainting the nature of the representation of the kingdom with ambiguity and influencing the final setting of the functions the Cortes could perform. In fact, if the Parliaments or Cortes of that time theoretically represented the kingdom, in the sense of putting before the king the plurality of corporations, orders, or estates that constituted the kingdom, it is obvious that the continued absence of the nobility and the clergy created a fundamental anomaly in the way in which this representation was articulated in Castile.20 The Cortes, in that situation, in actuality performed as a junta or council of cities. This does not mean, however, that they renounced the perception of themselves also as an organ of institutional representation of the kingdom of Castile as a whole, a fact from which a fundamental tension was derived that was never to be satisfactorily resolved. That tension is best described as one between a particularistic vision of the kingdom with which the cities tended to identify themselves and another more integrated and hierarchical one, which, for different reasons, most closely served the interests of the crown and of the Cortes. * * * Taxation was the area in which the collaboration between king and kingdom was at its best. So much so that the existence of an intimate


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correlation between the course of the Castilian fiscal regime and that of its representative system may be postulated, despite the fact that the political and doctrinal framework in which this collaboration took place was full of ambiguities and even contradictions. The law, at least, was definite. It has already been pointed out that theoretically neither tax nor tribute could be imposed in the kingdom without calling Cortes and without the consent of the proctors. The ruling political doctrines of the age were, however, less unanimous and more flexible. In effect, although most of the theorists accepted the political convenience of seeking the consent of the kingdom in fiscal matters, when debating the causa impositionis or the titulus exigendi many were, ultimately, inclined to center the debate on the justice of the imposition or to make the possibilities and limits of the fiscal powers of the sovereigns depend more on imperatives of natural law than on “constitutional rules.” Fiscal practice, on the king’s part, was driven by impulses from short-term needs and these could be so extreme as to lead to the law not always being respected. In such cases the monarchs did not hesitate to add diverse tributes and expedients—the sale of offices, of public lands and so on— to the taxes and subsidies that were approved in the Cortes, the payment of which they imposed by royal authority. They considered them, in a highly controversial way, regalía, or royal prerogatives that, as such, were not subject to any kind of parliamentary concession or confirmation. In this respect, the Junta de Cortes stated, in 1655, that “the obligation of defense comes before natural law and permits and legitimizes all that is not intrinsically bad.”21 All considered, an analysis of the structure of the royal incomes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries clearly reveals how important the concessions by the kingdom in Cortes became to the royal finances in Castile. Indeed, in the first twenty years of the reign of Philip IV, between 43 percent and 51 percent of all royal incomes already came from this source, and later the proportion may even have been over 60 percent.22 As a consequence, a large part of the royal revenues came from a kind of income tax whose quantity and terms of payment were to be negotiated with the cities in Cortes and whose administration had to be delegated to local communities. Consensus between king and kingdom became, thus, a necessity on matters of contribution, despite the tensions and difficulties involved, and this also ensured the role of the Cortes, turning them into the ideal institution for any agreement. As the fiscal functions of the Cortes increased, they also strengthened their position in the politicoadministrative structure of the monarchy. The scene I have just described was not, however, free of problems. One of the most critical was how slowly the processes of

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negotiation moved. Besides the delays caused by the need to submit to the decisive vote of the cities what was only approved in a consultative way in the Cortes, it was also necessary to add the high cost of the lengthening sessions. In order to gain their support the proctors were usually rewarded, or bribed, by granting them favors, by supplementing their meager salaries paid by their cities or even by covering their costs in those cases in which the city councils did not take responsibility for them. Therefore, the Cortes consumed large sums of money, reducing the yield of the subsidies that the kingdom voted to an unacceptable extent. This in turn fed the bad reputation of the proctors in the eyes of the cities and increased the traditional mistrust between Cortes and the cities.23 The lack of functionality of the system became more and more evident as the fiscal demands of the crown increased. It was entirely logical, under such conditions, that the royal ministers soon began to feel the need to overcome the obstacles inherent in the parliamentary practices of Castile. The problem had two sides. It was necessary to speed up fiscal business and, as far as possible, to reduce the cost of the procedure, but it was also essential to ensure that the subsidies requested by the king were not going to be rejected by the kingdom. In order to achieve this, the cohort of theologians and jurists who normally came to the aid of the crown’s claims, began insisting on the fulfillment of obligations contracted by aldermen and proctors if they recognized the justice of the royal demands. Both groups, for example, said Father Márquez in 1619, were nothing but “judges” deciding between the “causes” that the king invoked to seek aid, and the “excuses” that the kingdom set up to deny them on the good understanding that if the king’s demand was fair, they were obliged in conscience to concede what was asked of them.24 The argument did not depart from the classical scholastic view of the fiscal problem. The taxes were only justified if their establishment was directed toward the common good. If so, the sovereigns had legitimacy for imposing them and the subjects were obliged to pay them. The tax, to sum up, was viewed more as an ethical than a legal obligation and its application was subject to fulfillment of the requisites of authority, cause, and form so solidly implanted in the political philosophy of the age.25 The campaign of indoctrination to which the Cortes and the cities were undoubtedly subjected was not, in any case, enough to implant an approval procedure for contributions that was any faster or cheaper. This was not easy to achieve but the issue could be approached from various angles. Making the Cortes more powerful than the cities might have been one feasible alternative. For some time


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the royal ministers had contemplated that possibility. This is shown by the fact that around 1580 the question began to be asked whether the proctors of Cortes were more ministers of the kingdom than agents of the cities, which should have compelled them to make the general good of the kingdom prevail over the particular interests of its cities.26 With the passage of time, the doubts surrounding this question were dispelled to the benefit of the crown’s interests. The attribution of the decisive vote that had traditionally been exercised by the aldermen to the proctors of Cortes in 1632 is to be understood in this context. This decision regarding the proctors was taken after an entirely opposite strategy had been attempted: that of not calling the kingdom to Cortes for the approval of subsidies. Such a claim should be justified without departing too far from the fundamental principle of consent to the tax. Because the cities had the last word on approving these subsidies, it was understood that it would be enough if they were submitted directly to the decisive vote of their councils. Several documents and writings dated around 1621 pointed in this direction27 and their suggestions were to be executed after the death of Philip IV in 1665. Nevertheless, more radical alternatives could also be considered. The decision taken in 1624 by a majority of cities seems to be at the root of this new way of seeing the relationship between king and kingdom in fiscal matters. That year, using their powers, still decisive at that time, the cities refused to grant a large subsidy of seventy-two million ducats to be paid over twelve years despite its having been approved in the Cortes by the consultative vote of the proctors after months of debate. The refusal of the cities to accept this subsidy had caused great commotion, leading Olivares, according to writings of Monsignor Sachetti, Bishop of Gravina, at that time papal nuncio in Madrid, to hold a Junta of the Councils of State and of Castile, whose members had to pronounce on whether the king could impose the subsidies of millones “against the express will of his subjects” (contro la spressa volontá dei sudditi). The majority of the members of the Councils of Castile and of State were against the initiative, and so there was no alternative other than a return to the traditional dynamic of negotiating subsidies with the cities in Cortes.28 Thus, in 1624, the kingdom would approve a new subsidy of twelve million ducats and in 1629, extend by another nine years that of eighteen millions that it had conceded a decade earlier. Given the traditions of Castile in these matters, the most logical decision was the one that had been taken. Nevertheless, the needs of the monarchy were still enormous, compelling the crown to request new subsidies. Castile was thus under unprecedented fiscal pressure from which,

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obviously, the privileged estates and the clergy were not free. There was nothing surprising in this. The novelty was not that the clergy were forced to contribute to the millones, but was the way in which they were supposed to do so. In effect, from the 1630s onwards, it began to be thought unnecessary to ask for a papal Breve for the contribution by the clergy, or even worse, that it was enough just to ask for it even if it were not conceded, so that the clergy would be forced to pay. The whole argument rested on the idea that the collaboration of laity and clergy in defense of the community was an imperative of natural law,29even more so if it was assumed, as the royal ministers insisted on arguing that Pope Urban VIII resisted the concession of the Breves, or accepted their concession with so many conditions that it made the ecclesiastical contribution inoperable, because he was partial toward France. * * * The efforts of Olivares to deprive the Cortes of the powers they had always had in fiscal matters failed. On the other hand, a mixture of ecclesiastical opposition, provincial rebellions, and administrative inefficiency finally put an end to other initiatives, such as the tax on salt, which Olivares tried to impose in 1631 to replace the millones. The attribution in 1632 of the decisive vote to the proctors, however, could have been formally maintained thereafter, although not without some vacillation.30 Olivares, meanwhile, took advantage of the incapacity of the cities and of the Cortes to clearly delimit the functions that both shared in the administration of the subsidies and their failure to combat fraud, in order to extend the powers of the Council of Finance in both areas, by awarding functions that did not correspond to it. With this, however, he achieved no more than provoking fresh tensions with the cities and with the Cortes, and even between the royal councils themselves. On the other hand, although he made the Comisión de Millones more powerful in 1639 as the supreme and exclusive court in all matters concerning the subsidy, which was the de facto equivalent to admitting that it functioned as a new Council,31 he took the utmost care in his attempt to control its functioning by adding royal ministers to an institution from which hitherto they had been set apart. Whatever the case, the fall of Olivares partially moderated the tensions his policies had provoked in Castile. His successor, Don Luis de Haro, did not consider it prudent to maintain the pressure on the kingdom and, indeed, from 1642 and for the next thirteen years no new subsidies were requested. The Cortes, however, would be


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required to approve one in 1655. Be that as it may, these Cortes like those which had preceded them since the fall of Olivares, and like those convoked in 1660, the last ones to be held in the history of the Castilian assembly, in spite of their being attributed the decisive vote in 1632, continued to show the same slow pace and high cost that had so often raised doubts about the convenience of their summoning.32 This was normal behavior in the usual places. During those years, however, certain initiatives were introduced which eventually became consolidated. Ensuring the contribution of the clergy to the subsidies was still considered an indispensable condition for guaranteeing their yield. The kingdom, in this way, would request that the ecclesiastical state pay that part of the subsidies which, according to “law” and “justice,” might correspond to it. The king, for his part, would negotiate with the pope the concession of the appropriate Breves, but would not wait to receive them in order to force the clergy to contribute, under the promise to return to them anything incorrectly paid if the pope refused to concede them. On the other hand, he resorted to legal subterfuge to get around ecclesiastical censures when these arose or tried to block them by resorting to appeal to the royal courts (recursos de fuerza). For this reason, relations with the church were especially abrasive between 1656–58 owing, above all, to the energetic reaction of the Archbishops of Seville and Toledo or the Bishops of Cordova, Malaga, Segovia, Osma, or Lugo against what they considered to be abuses committed by the royal ministers. Nevertheless, the much more accommodating attitude of other hierarchs of the Church, who consented to turn into donations (donativos) the amounts that should have been returned to the clergy, eventually normalized their contribution to the subsidies, although the king had to make concessions on administrative and jurisdictional matters. Other measures adopted following the fall of Olivares would also have important consequences for the future of the Cortes. In effect, a consultation of the Junta de Asistentes in March 1645 informed that in the two previous years “in the cities themselves, by excluding the Cortes” subsidies had been obtained “so great that in no Cortes have they been greater.” The experience was so positive that the crown decided to award some favors to the aldermen to compensate them and to bind the cities in the future. This decision is worth underlining as it seems to have been the first time that it was taken. The consultation, moreover, in view of their success, did not hesitate to draw conclusions on the procedure declaring that from it “such consequences shall result that facilitate the subsidies and in some way exclude the Cortes.”33 It was not, of course, the first time that contributions had been obtained

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directly from the cities.34 What was new in 1643–44, however, was the approval of subsidies by the city councils that had, until then, been awarded in Cortes.35 King and kingdom provided evidence of being able to come to an agreement outside the Cortes.36 Nevertheless, if such initiatives, which were at first unconnected and unsystematic, could in the future achieve continuity it was because they were taking place in a context that had necessarily to magnify them, and this was marked by the complete exhaustion and alteration of the fundamental nature of the most important incomes that supported the Castilian fiscal system. There are a number of elements that should be highlighted in this respect. First, after 1640 only a couple of new subsidies were granted by the kingdom and from then on their yields underwent a steady decline.37 Second, although the millones were granted for a limited time, it was recognized from the reign of Philip III that the sisas with which they were paid were collected for longer than was initially proposed, until the quantity the kingdom had agreed to pay was satisfied. This meant the Cortes may have been negotiating the concession of new subsidies at a time when they had not yet finished paying the previous ones. The crown also gained authorization from the kingdom to place bonds on millones. Around 1640, their interests rose to 1,370,000 ducats. Finally, in 1632, also with the prior consent of the kingdom, the sale went ahead of offices related to the administration of the millones subsidies, such as those of clerks (escribanos) and treasurers (tesoreros). For one reason or another, a significant part of the crown’s incomes, which were theoretically extraordinary, thus gradually became permanent requirements, as their renewal was necessary to pay bonds and salaries. It is clear as a consequence that the idea itself of a subsidy, traditionally understood as a temporary aid for specific aims and reserved for certain conditions, had been weakening. Finally, other factors contributed greatly to the denaturalization of the Castilian fiscal system. It was evident to all, for example, that the conditions stipulated for the subsidies often failed to be fulfilled. The royal ministers, under the pretext of fighting fraud, constantly interfered in their administration, in breach of what had been agreed by “reciprocal contract” between the parties. They also committed excesses when the kingdom authorized them to intervene. * * * Under these circumstances the negative aspects of summoning the kingdom to Cortes became more and more overshadowed by the positive ones. It is hardly surprising that the Cortes ceased to be summoned


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after the death of Philip IV.38 A period of royal minority had begun and it is not unreasonable to think that the regent’s government might fear that the Cortes could take advantage of this situation, considering the political instability so evident in so many European monarchies. But the decision finally taken by Mariana de Austria on July 25, 1667 with respect to the Cortes did not bring revolutionary changes in the constitutional relations between king and kingdom. It was decided not to suppress the Cortes, but to cease summoning them, something which had always been a royal prerogative. She did not stop consulting the kingdom, nor can it be said in formal terms that its organs of representation had disappeared. Technically speaking, the only thing that had happened was what contemporaries called a gap in Cortes (hueco de Cortes), that is, a period between sessions. While the monarch failed to summon the kingdom again, the functions that the Cortes had held passed automatically to their Diputación that had been established in 1525 and to their Comisión de Millones, founded in 1611. Both institutions had to guide themselves by the instructions that the proctors signed at the end of each summons. This is what had always applied and was exactly what was done after 1665. To be sure, getting rid of the Cortes put an end to some problems but it also created others under the new system. It was not possible or, at least not advisable, to request new subsidies from the kingdom, as this had always been done in Cortes. The most that could be hoped for was that the cities would renew those already in existence, and this is precisely what they were asked to do in 1667. Every six years thereafter their renewal would be directly requested from the cities through the Diputación. Millones subsidies and encabezamientos, then, were subject to the decisive votes of the cities. It was what had been intended in the 1620s and what had occasionally been done in the forties, which meant there were precedents to appeal to in order to justify the decision not to summon the kingdom in Cortes. The cities, in turn, had not shown themselves to be in disagreement with this procedure. In accordance with this situation, the method chosen from then on by the royal ministers in order to drain more resources from the Castilians was neither new taxes nor additional subsidies, which would have required agreement of the Cortes, but the imposition of expedients or the request for the concession of donations by cities or individuals. The Castilian representative system and the principle of taxation by consent had, therefore, survived the last of the sessions that the assembly representing it managed to hold. Nevertheless, it did so under increasingly precarious conditions insomuch as the most important of the representative institutions in the period between sessions, the Diputación del Reino and the Comisión de Millones, had fallen into the

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grip of a handful of cities and a handful of proctors. This was so because the regulations of the Cortes established that the members of those two institutions should be selected only from among the aldermen of the cities that had the right to do so and from among those who had served as proctors in the last Cortes. In other words, while a new summons of the kingdom to Cortes did not take place, the right to be a member of both institutions belonged to those who had been selected in the last ones. Only in the case of absence or death of those previously selected could the cities fill the vacancies, and always with aldermen who had been proctors in those Cortes. The system, however, was too rigid. As time passed the number of aldermen eligible for these functions became dramatically reduced. Consequently, the possibility of any representation was in danger of vanishing.39 The tensions that this situation caused forced the king to solve the problem in 1694 by ordering the absorption of the Diputación del Reino by the Comisión de Millones and the setting up of a new method of electing its members. The cessation of the commissioners active at that time was ordered, and they were to be replaced by new ones chosen by the drawing of lots from among candidates elected by all the cities with a vote in Cortes from among all of their aldermen, not simply from those who had been proctors in the last Cortes. The new Commission began to work in 1698. It is only from this point that we can truly speak of an end of the Cortes of Castile under the Habsburg regime. This had not even happened in 1665, when the summons that Philip IV had signed before his death was suspended, nor in 1667, when it was decided to request the cities directly for the approval of the subsidies of millones, but happened only in 1698. It is really then, on setting up the new Diputación on a different base from what the kingdom in Cortes had ordered in 1658–64, that a new chapter opened in the history of the Castilian representative institutions. Between those two dates, the representation of the kingdom had atrophied, barely sustained by the old Diputación de las Alcabalas and a Comisión de Millones. The fiscal system had thus strayed from the control of the kingdom to the hands of the ministers of the king under the attentive tutelage of the Council of Finance.

Notes 1. Vladimiro Piskorski, Las Cortes de Castilla en el periodo de tránsito de la Edad Media a la Edad Moderna, 1188–1520 (Barcelona, 1977). 2. Recopilación de las leyes destos Reynos, hecha por mandato de la majestad católica del Rey don Felipe Segundo . . . (Valladolid, Lex Nova, 1982), fol. 124v⬚. (hereafter cited as NR).


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3. Piskorski, Las Cortes de Castilla, pp. 23–46. Ana Arranz Guzmán, “Reconstrucción y verificación de las Cortes castellano-leonesas: La participación del clero,” En la España Medieval 13 (1990), pp. 33–133. César Olivera Santos, Las Cortes de Castilla y León y la crisis del Reino (1445–1474) (Burgos, Instituto de Estudios Castellanos, 1986). 4. See Irving A.A. Thompson, “Cortes y ciudades: tipología de los procuradores (Extracción social, representatividad) in Las Cortes de Castilla y León en la Edad Moderna (Salamanca, 1989), p. 196. Juan Manuel Carretero Zamora, Cortes, Monarquía, ciudades. Las Cortes de Castilla a comienzos de la época moderna (1476–1515) (Madrid, Siglo XXI, 1988), pp. 303–40. Fortea Pérez, Monarquía y Cortes en la Corona de Castilla. Las ciudades ante la política fiscal de Felipe II (Valladolid, Cortes de Castilla y León, 1991), pp. 350–54. 5. NR, Lib. 6⬚, tít. 7⬚, ley 7 (1447) y Novísima Recopilación, lib. 3⬚, tít. 8⬚, ley 12 (1660). See some exceptions in Thompson, “Cortes y ciudades,” p. 198. NR, Lib. 6⬚, tít. 7⬚, ley 5. Novísima Recopilación, ley 2, lib. 3⬚, tít. 8⬚. 6. Carretero Zamora, Cortes, Monarquía, ciudades, pp. 303–40. Apparently, electoral processes did not attract great criticism in the cities during the sixteenth century. See Charles Hendricks, “Charles V and the Cortes of Castile. Politics in Renaissance Spain,” PhD thesis, Cornell University, 1975, p. 53. Regarding what happened in the seventeenth century, see Irving A.A.Thompson, Crown and Cortes in Castile. Government, Institutions and Representation in Early Modern Castile (Hampshire, UK, 1993), VIII, p. 57. In his view, the crown could only rely on the proctors who had strong relations with the court. 7. Fortea Pérez, Monarquía y Cortes, pp. 354–64. Juan de Mariana, Tratado y discurso de la moneda de vellón (Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1950), p. 578. 8. Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought. Public Law, and the State, 1100–1322 (Princeton, 1964), p. 116. 9. Francisco Martínez Marina, Teoría de las Cortes (Madrid, 1979), I, pp. 385–403. Carretero Zamora, Monarquía y ciudades, p. 32. Thompson, “Cortes y ciudades,” pp. 208–21. 10. Hendricks, Charles V and the Cortes, passim. José Ignacio Fortea Pérez, “Las Cortes de Castilla en los primeros años del reinado de Carlos V (1518–1537),” in De la Unión de Coronas al Imperio de Carlos V, ed. E. Belenguer (Madrid, Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior, 2001), I, pp. 411–44. See José Ignacio Fortea Pérez, “Las últimas Cortes del reinado de Carlos V (1538–1555),” in Carlos V. Europeismo y universalidad, ed. Juan L. Castellanos y Francisco Sánchez (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior, 2001), II, pp. 243–73. 11. The alcabala was a sales tax levied at a maximum rate of 10%, but in practice it was compounded at a much lower rate. Originally, alcabalas were collected by means of tax farmers, but from the end of

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12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

José Ignacio Fortea Pérez the fifteenth century individual municipalities began to make particular composition agreements or encabezamientos with the Council of Finance for their alcabalas under certain conditions and for specific periods of time. This system was later extended to the whole kingdom after long discussions. The first general encabezamiento of the alcabalas was signed between king and kingdom in 1536 for ten years and was extended for another ten years in 1539 in exchange for the granting of a extraordinary subsidy by the Cortes. Archivo General de Simancas (hereafter AGS). Patronato Real, leg. 72, fol. 61. Pope Urban VIII supported this point of view. Lucía Carpintero Aguado, “La Congregación del Clero de Castilla en el siglo XVII,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 1993. A summary in “La contribución del clero castellano a los servicios de millones,” Revista de Historia Moderna. Anales de la Universidad de Alicante 15 (1996), p. 275 and n. 12. Archivio Segreto Vaticano (hereafter ASV), Segre. Stato Spagna 72, fol. 239v⬚. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (hereafter BAV) Barberini Lat., 8357, fol. 70. With respect to the tax on salt, vide Juan Eloy Gelabert, Castilla convulsa, 1631–1652 (Barcelona, 2001), p. 18. Vide memorial written by Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, bishop of Osma, to Philippe IV. Real Academia de la Historia MS. 9/1026, fols. 143–76. I have used the Vatican copy. BAV. Barberini Lat., 3608, fols. 1–33, points 44 to 48. See ASV Segre Stato Spagna, 119, fol. 316, letter, November 27, 1658. See also ASV Segre Stato Spagna, 121, fol. 35–38v⬚, March, 1659. Salustiano De Dios, “La evolución de las Cortes de Castilla durante el siglo XV,” in Realidad e imágenes del poder en España a fines de la Edad Media, ed. Adelina Rucquoi (Valladolid, 1988). Dios, “La evolución de las Cortes de Castilla en los siglos XVI y XVII,” in Hispania, entre derechos propios y derechos nacionales 2, ed. Bartolomé Clavero, Paolo Grossi, and Francisco Tomás y Valiente (Milano, 1990). Dios, “La evolución,” p. 627. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), pp. 241–52. Keith M. Baker, “Representation,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, Volume 1, The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford and New York, 1987), p. 471. Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, “La representación política en el Antiguo Régimen,” in El Senado en la Historia, ed. Manuel Pérez Ledesma (Madrid, Senado. Servicio de Publicaciones, 1966). José Ignacio Fortea Pérez, “Las ciudades, las Cortes y el problema de la representación política en la Castilla Moderna,” in Imágenes de la diversidad. El mundo urbano en la Corona de Castilla, Siglos XVI–XVII, ed. José Ignacio Fortea Pérez (Santander, 1997). Manuel Danvila, “Cortes de Madrid de 1655,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia en adelante, BRAH XII (1888), p. 25.


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21. Irving A.A. Thompson, “Crown and Cortes in Castile, 1590–1665,” Parliaments, States and Representation 2 (1982), pp. 31. 22. A “Discourse on reforming the expenses of the kingdom,” perhaps written in 1621, estimated it at over 1.300.000 ducats in the last three Cortes. See Real Academia de la Historia. Colección Pellicer, XIV, fol 35. Another example in Thompson, Crown and Corte VI, 37–38. Manuel Danvila, “Cortes de Madrid de 1638–1643,” BRAH XVI (1890), p. 155. 23. AGS, PR, leg. 90, fol. 485. 24. Renzo Pomini, La “causa impositionis” nello svolgimento storico della dottrina financiaria (Milano, 1972), chapter II, pp. 25–43. 25. AGS, PR, fol. 30. 26. See, for example, Jerónimo de Ceballos, Arte real para el buen gobierno de los Reyes y Príncipes y de sus vasallos, en el que se refieren las obligaciones de cada uno, con los principales documentos para el buen gobierno (Toledo, 1623), p. 114. 27. ACC, XXXIX, pp. 436–40 y 447–62. Real Academia de la Historia, MS. 9/6418 fol. 57. Manuel Danvila, “Cortes de 1623 a 1629”. BRAH XV (1889), pp. 511. BAV Barberini Lat, 8302, fol. 53, ASV Segre. Stato Spagna, p. 64, fol. 441. 28. Quintín Aldea Vaquero, España y Europa en el siglo XVII. Correspondencia de Saavedra Fajardo (Madrid, CSIC, 1986). 29. See José Luis Bermejo Cabrera, “En torno a las Cortes del Antiguo Régimen,” Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español (1996), pp. 191–96. Irving A.A. Thompson, “Cortes y ciudades” p. 218 and Crown and Cortes VI, p. 40. ASV. Segre. Stato Spagna, p. 63, fol. 375, letter of the nuncio Camilli to the Segretaria di Stato, February 13, 1655. 30. Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, “Monarquía, Cortes y cuestión constitucional en Castilla durante la Edad Moderna,” Fragmentos de Monarquía (Madrid, 1992), pp. 296–97. 31. Manuel Danvila, “Cortes de Madrid de 1646 a 1647,” BRAH XVI (1890), p. 280, 289, “Nuevos datos para escribir la historia de las Cortes de Castilla en el reinado de Felipe IV,” BRAH XI (1887), p. 498 y “Nuevos datos para escribir la historia de las Cortes de Felipe IV,” BRAH XII (1888), p. 33 and BRAH XVII (1890), p. 279. 32. Manuel Danvila, “Cortes de Madrid de 1638 a 1643.” BRAH XVI (1890), p. 155–56 33. Fortea Pérez, Monarquía y Cortes, p. 386. 34. This conclusion can de deduced from a consulta dated 1645, published by Manuel Danvila, “Cortes de Madrid de 1646 a 1647,”BRAH XVI (1890), p. 229. 35. A consulta dated March 1645 said the approval of the subsidies was “the most estimated prerogative of the cities.” For this reason, royal ministers had always considered “a very dangerous thing to break

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36.

37. 38.

39.

José Ignacio Fortea Pérez with them and with the customs of these kingdoms.” Manuel Danvila, “Cortes de Madrid de 1638 a 1643,” BRAH XVI (1890), p. 155. See ACD, Libros de Acuerdos, leg. 96, s.f., May 5, 1669. See also José Ignacio Andrés Ucendo, La fiscalidad en Castilla en el siglo XVII: los servicios de millones, 1601–1700 (Bilbao, 1999), p. 30. See also Miguel Artola, La Hacienda del Antiguo Régimen (Madrid, 1982), p. 481. Juan Antonio Sánchez Belén, La política fiscal en Castilla durante el reinado de Carlos II, Siglo XXI (Madrid, 1996), p. 238. ACD, Libros de Acuerdos, leg. 96, October 17, 1664. Irving A.A. Thompson, “The End of the Cortes of Castile,” Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 4 (1984), pp. 25–133. See also Juan Luis Castellanos, Las Cortes de Castilla y su Diputación (1621–1789). Entre absolutismo y pactismo. (Madrid, Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 1990). Charles Jago, “Habsbourg Absolutism and the Cortes of Castile,” The American Historical Review 86 (1981), pp. 307–26. José Ignacio Fortea Pérez, “Las Cortes de Castilla y su Diputación en el reinado de Carlos II: Historia de un largo sueño,” in Actas de las Juntas del Reino de Galicia, XII: 1701–1704, Estudio Preliminar (Santiago de Compostela, Dirección Xeral do Patrimonio Histórico e Documental, 2003), pp. 63–98. Condition 30 of the 2⬚ género of the twenty-four millions subsidy. ACD, Libros de Acuerdos, leg. 96, s.f., December 5, 1679, 2003.

Further Readings The petitions formulated by the kingdom in the Cortes held until 1559 have been published in five volumes: Cortes de los Antiguos Reinos de León y Castilla (Madrid, M. Rivadeneyra, 1861–1903). Another sixty-one volumes include the records of the sessions held between 1563 and 1664. See Actas de las Cortes de Castilla (Madrid, Imprenta Nacional, 1861–2000). Manuel Danvila compiled many documents about the Cortes of Castile during the reigns of Philip III and Philip IV in some articles published in the Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia VIII, XI, XII, XV, XVI and XVII (1886–90). See also his book El poder civil en España, 6 vols. (Madrid, Imprenta y Fundición de Manuel Tello, 1885–86), National Archives—Archivo General de Simancas (Sección Patronato Real), Archivo Histórico Nacional (Sección Consejos), Archivo del Congreso de los Diputados, Real Academia de la Historia (Colección Pellicer)—have a considerable amount of information about the Cortes—letters, memorials, reports, records of the sessions—only partially explored.


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Select Bibliography Carretero Zamora, Juan Manuel. Cortes, Monarquía, ciudades:Las Cortes de Castilla a comienzos de la época moderna (1476–1515) (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1988). Castellanos, Juan Luis: Las Cortes de Castilla y su Diputación (1621–1789): Entre absolutismo y pactismo. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 1990. Dios, Salustiano de. “La evolución de las Cortes de Castilla en los siglos XVI y XVII.” In Hispania, entre derechos propios y derechos nacionales. Ed. Bartolomé Clavero, Paolo Grossi, and Francisco Tomás y Valiente (Milano, 1990), 2: 593–755. Fernández Albaladejo, Pablo. Fragmentos de Monarquía (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1992). Fortea Pérez, José Ignacio. Monarquía y Cortes en la Corona de Castilla: Las ciudades ante la política fiscal de Felipe I (Valladolid: Cortes de Castilla y León, 1991). Hendricks, Charles. “Charles V and the Cortes of Castile: Politics in Renaissance Spain.” PhD thesis, Cornell University, 1975. Irving, Thompson A.A. Crown and Cortes in Castile: Government, Institutions and Representation in Early Modern Castile (Hampshire, 1993). Jago, Charles. “Habsbourg Absolutism and the Cortes of Castile.” The American Historical Review 86 (1981): 307–26. Piskorski, Vladimiro. Las Cortes de Castilla en el periodo de tránsito de la Edad Media a la Edad Moderna, 1188–1520 ( Barcelona, 1977).


Chapter 9

Traditions of Consensual Governance in the Construction of S tate Authority in the E arly Modern E mpires in America J a c k P. G r e e n e

“In every thing except their foreign trade,” observed Adam Smith in

1776, dilating upon the causes of the rapid development of new colonial societies in the Wealth of Nations, “the liberty of the English colonists is complete. It is in every respect equal to that of their fellowcitizens at home, and is secured in the same manner, by an assembly of the representatives of the people.” “The government of the English colonies,” he observed, “is perhaps the only one which, since the world began, could give perfect security to the inhabitants of so very distant a province.”1 In these passages, Smith called attention to the most prominent feature of early modern English colonial governance: the transplantation of parliamentary institutions to Ireland and America. Wherever English settlers went in large numbers, English political and legal institutions went with them. By the time Smith wrote, and by the time thirteen of Britain’s American colonies seceded from the British Empire in 1783, this practice was so fundamental a feature of British overseas colonization that it was virtually unthinkable that any polity that included a substantial number of property-owning British settlers could operate without British representative institutions. Over the nineteenth century, settler colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and

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Jack P. Greene

South Africa routinely established such institutions, and in the twentieth century, even nonsettler societies with small cadres of British political and military officials presiding over large indigenous populations, developed them, in what is surely one of the most enduring legacies of British overseas colonization. How, why, and by whom the foundations of this legacy were laid in colonial British America during the early modern era are the subjects of this chapter. Smith’s observations might be taken to suggest that the transfer of parliamentary institutions to the colonies was part of some master plan worked out on the eve of colonization with the objective of replicating the English polity with its division of authority between a Crown and a parliament of upper and lower houses. But this suggestion bears little resemblance to what actually happened. As Edmund Burke noted in 1757 in his underappreciated two-volume survey of the first two and a half centuries of European occupation of the Americas, “nothing of an enlarged and legislative spirit appears in the planning of our colonies.” Rather, he observed candidly, the “settlement of our colonies was never pursued upon any regular plan; but they were formed, grew, and flourished, as accidents, the nature of the climate, or the dispositions of private men happened to operate.”2 Burke’s remarks accurately describe the ad hoc nature of the process by which the English planted colonies in America during the first threequarters of the seventeenth century, and England’s experience was by no means extraordinary. At the beginning of the era of early modern colonization, none of the emerging nation-states of Europe had either the coercive resources necessary to establish its hegemony over portions of the New World or the financial wherewithal to mobilize such resources. As a result, during the early stages of colonization, any nation-state contemplating overseas ventures farmed out that task, either to private groups organized into chartered trading companies or to influential individuals. In return for authorization from the Crown and in the expectation of realizing extensive economic and social advantages, these “adventurers” agreed to assume the heavy financial burdens of founding, defending, and succoring beachheads of European occupation in America. In effect, European rulers gave these private agents licenses with wide discretion to operate in domains over which the state’s claims were highly tenuous and over whose indigenous inhabitants it exercised no effective control, much less authority. If the gamble was successful, European rulers secured at least minimal jurisdiction over American territories and peoples at minimal cost to royal treasuries. Some of these early private agents of European imperialism, especially the trading companies operating under the aegis of the Portuguese

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and Dutch, enjoyed considerable success in establishing trading footholds to tap some of the economic potential of the New World. However, unless they encountered wealthy native empires, rich mineral deposits, or vast pools of native labor—things that happened on a large scale only in Mexico and Peru—few private adventurers had the resources to sustain the high costs of settling, administering, and developing a colony for more than a short period. Most of them were quickly forced to seek cooperation and contributions from settlers, traders, and other individual participants in the colonizing process. These efforts to enlist such cooperation acknowledged the fact that the actual process of establishing effective centers of European power in America was often less the result of the activities of colonial organizers or licensees than of the many groups and individuals who took actual possession of land, built estates and businesses, turned what had previously been wholly aboriginal landscapes into ones that were at least partly European, constructed and presided over a viable system of economic organization, created towns or other political units, and subjugated, reduced to profitable labor, killed off, or expelled the original inhabitants. Making up for their scarcity of economic resources, thousands of Europeans, by dint of their industry and initiative, created social spaces for themselves and their families in America and thereby created for themselves status, capital, and power. Throughout the new European Americas during the early modern era, independent individual participants in the colonizing process were thus engaged in a deep and widespread process of individual and corporate self-empowerment. In contemporary Europe only a small fraction of the male population ever managed to rise out of a state of socioeconomic dependency to achieve the civic competence, the full right to have a voice in political decisions that was the preserve of independent property holders. By contrast, as a consequence of the easy availability of land or other resources, a very large proportion of the adult male white colonists acquired land or other resources, built estates, and achieved individual independence. This development produced strong demands on the part of the large empowered settler populations for the extension to the colonies of the same rights to security or property and civic participation that appertained to the empowered, high-status, and independent property holders in the polities from which they came. In their view, colonial governance, no less than metropolitan governance, should guarantee that men of their standing would not be governed without consultation or in ways that were patently against their interests. Along with the vast distance of the colonies from Europe, these

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circumstances powerfully drove those who were nominally in charge of the colonies toward the establishment and toleration of political structures that involved active consultation with, if not the formal consent of, local settlers. Consultation meant that local populations would more willingly both acknowledge the legitimacy of the authority of private agencies of colonization and contribute to local costs. The earliest stages of colonization thus resulted in the emergence in new colonial peripheries of many new and relatively autonomous centers of European power effectively under local control. These centers invariably were reflections of the European worlds from which the settlers came. Intending to create offshoots of the Old World in the New, the large numbers of emigrants to the colonies insisted on taking their laws and institutions with them and making them the primary foundations for the new societies they sought to establish. For these societies, these laws and institutions functioned as “a concomitant of emigration.” They were not, as one scholar has noted, “imposed upon settlers but claimed by them.”3 They served as a vivid and symbolically powerful badge of the emigrants’ deepest aspirations to retain in their new places of abode their identities as members of the European societies to which they were attached, identities that, in their eyes, both established their superiority over and sharply distinguished them from the seemingly rude and uncivilized people they were seeking to dispossess. The English settlements established in North America, the West Indies, and the Atlantic islands of Bermuda and the Bahamas provide a case study of the way this process worked. Among the main components of the emerging identity of English people in early modern England, the Protestantism and, increasingly during the eighteenth century, the slowly expanding commercial and strategic might of the English nation were both important. Far more significant, however, were the systems of law and liberty that, contemporary English and many foreign observers seemed to agree, distinguished English people from all other peoples on the face of the globe.4 The proud boast of the English was that, through a variety of conquests and upheaval, they had been able, in marked contrast to most other political societies in Europe, to retain their identity as a free people who had secured their liberty through their dedication to what later analysts would call the rule of law. A long-developing tradition of jurisprudential political discourse supported this dedication. Emphasizing the role of law as a restraint upon the power of the Crown, this tradition was rooted in such older writings as Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae, written during the fifteenth century but not published until 1616. Several of


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the most prominent judges and legal thinkers of the early seventeenth century, including Sir Edward Coke, Sir John Davies, and Nathaniel Bacon fully elaborated it in a series of important works. Writing in an age when, except for the Netherlands, every other major European state was slipping into absolutism, and England’s first two Stuart kings seemed to be trying to extend the prerogatives of the Crown and perhaps even to do away with parliaments in England, these early seventeenth-century legal writers were all anxious to erect legal and constitutional restraints that would ensure security of life, liberty, and property against such extensions of royal power.5 This emerging jurisprudential tradition rested on a distinction, already fully elaborated by Fortescue, between two fundamentally different kinds of monarchy, what Fortescue called regal monarchy and political monarchy. Whereas in a regal monarchy such as France, “What pleased the prince,” as Fortescue wrote, had “the force of law,” in a political monarchy such as England, “the regal power” was “restrained by political law.” Bound by their coronation oaths to the observance of English laws, English kings could neither “change laws at their pleasure” nor “make new ones” “without the assent of the subjects.” The happy result of this system, according to Fortescue, was that English people, in contrast to their neighbors, were governed by laws to which they had consented, and, as Coke and other writers pointed out, this was as true for the common law, to which the people assented through long usage and custom, as it was for the statute law passed by the parliaments to which they sent representatives.6 With a wide variety of other contemporary political writers, the exponents of the English jurisprudential tradition agreed that the happy capacity of English people to preserve their liberty rested largely upon two institutions for determining and making law: juries and parliaments. By guaranteeing that no legal case would be determined “but by the Verdict of his Peers, (or Equals) his Neighbours, and of his own Condition,” wrote the Whig political publicist Henry Care, the first, juries, gave every person “a Share in the executive Part of the Law.” By giving each independent person through “his chosen Representatives” a share “in the Legislative (or Lawmaking) Power,” the second parliament, insured that no law should be passed without the consent of the nation’s property holders. These “two grand Pillars of English Liberty,” declared Care in paraphrasing Coke, provided English people with “a greater inheritance” than they had ever received from their immediate “Progenitors.” For Englishmen, liberty was thus, not just a condition enforced by law but the very essence of their emerging

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national identity.7 For English people migrating overseas to establish new communities of settlement, the capacity to enjoy—to possess—the English system of law and liberty was thus crucial to their ability to maintain their identity as English people and to continue to think of themselves and be thought of as English. For that reason, as well as because they regarded English legal and constitutional arrangements as the very best way to preserve the properties they hoped to acquire in their new homes, it is scarcely surprising that, in establishing local enclaves of power during the first few years of colonization, English settlers all over America made every effort to construct them on English legal foundations. As the legal historian George Dargo has observed, “the attempt to establish English law and the ‘rights and liberties of Englishmen’ was constant from the first settlement to the [American] Revolution” and beyond.8 Nevertheless, as Yunlong Man has shown in his careful study of the first half century of development of provincial political institutions in England’s five most successful colonies, English authorities did not anticipate the development of such demands when trying to work out a mode of governance for the colonies. “During the first half of the seventeenth century, the formative years of the colonial polities,” Man finds, “English authorities never devised, or even conceived of,” an arrangement by which colonial governance would be modeled on “the national government of England.” Instead, they remained committed to a conciliar form of colonial governance of the kind they devised for Virginia during its early years. This form consisted of an appointed governor and councilors and included no formal devices for consulting the broader population, and they continued for several decades to think of this conciliar form as the norm for English colonial governance.9 But several developments during the early stages of the colonizing process encouraged the development of a representative component in the emerging colonial constitutions. To entice settlers, colonial organizers found early on that they not only had to offer them property in land but also guarantee them the property in rights by which English people had traditionally secured their real and material possessions. Thus in 1619 the Virginia Company of London found it necessary to establish a polity that included a representative assembly through which the settlers could, in the time-honored fashion of the English, make—and formally consent to—the laws under which they would live. Directed by company leaders “to imitate and follow the policy of the form of government, laws, customs, and manner of trial; and other administration of justice, used in the realm of England,” the new assembly, the first such body in England’s still small American


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world, immediately claimed the right to consent to all taxes levied on the inhabitants of Virginia.10 The legal instruments of English colonization—letters patent, charters, proclamations—encouraged this attempt in three ways. First, they often specified that the settlers and their progeny should be treated as “natural born subjects of England” and thereby strongly suggested that there would be no legal distinctions between English people who lived in the home island and those who resided in the colonies. Second, they required that colonies operate under no laws that were repugnant to “Laws, Statutes, Customs, and Rights of our Kingdom of England” and thereby powerfully implied that the laws of England were to provide the model, and the standard, for all colonial laws. Third, beginning with the charter to Maryland in 1632, they also stipulated that colonies should use and enjoy “all Privileges, Franchises and Liberties of this our Kingdom of England, freely, quietly, and peacefully to have and possess . . . in the same manner as our Leige-Men born, or to be born within our said Kingdom of England, without Impediment, Molestation, Vexation, Impeachment, or Grievance,” and that no laws be passed without the consent of the freemen of the colony.11 In no case more than twenty years after the founding of a colony, and often much earlier, these conditions and developments encouraged the establishment of representative institutions. Between roughly 1620 and 1660, every American colony with a substantial body of settlers adopted some form of elected assembly to pass laws for the polities they were creating: Virginia and Bermuda in the 1620s, Massachusetts Bay, Maryland, Connecticut, Plymouth, New Haven, and Barbados in the 1630s, St. Kitts, Antigua, and Rhode Island in the 1640s, and Montserrat and Nevis in the 1650s. By 1660, all thirteen settled colonies in the Americas had functioning representative assemblies. From New England to Barbados, colonial English America proved to be an extraordinarily fertile ground for parliamentary governance.12 Even in situations in which company officials or proprietors took the initiative in establishing these early law-making bodies, as was the case with Virginia, Bermuda, and Maryland, the representative bodies never acted as the “passive servants and petitioners of the prerogative” as had been the case with the medieval House of Commons. On the contrary, modern historians have been impressed by their “effectiveness and spirit of assertiveness.” “Usually from their very first meetings,” Michael Kammen has noted, they acted as the aggressive spokesmen for the proliferating settlements within the colonies.

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Claiming their constituents’ rights to the traditional English principles of consensual governance, early on they insisted that no laws or taxes could go into effect without their assent, demanded the initiative in legislation, turned themselves into high courts of appeal and original jurisdiction in the manner of the medieval House of Commons, and rarely shrank from controversy with “local executives, proprietors, or the Crown.”13 To be sure, it took about twenty years for these bodies “to materialize, stabilize, and take permanent form in each colony.” During the early years, they usually did not sit as a separate body but met together with the governor’s council or even with the governor himself to hear cases and pass laws.14 But they set course early toward achieving their independence from the executive, and by the 1640s the larger colonies, each of them on its own initiative, had all moved toward a bicameral legislature, with the lower house sitting separately from the governor and council—Virginia in 1643, Massachusetts Bay in 1644, Maryland in 1650, and Barbados in 1652. Local exigencies, not emulation, drove this development. In every case, the specific shape of a provincial polity was the product of what Yunlong Man calls an “indigenous development.” Some popular provincial governors, such as Sir William Berkeley in Virginia and Philip Bell in Barbados, fostered these developments, but in doing so they were invariably merely consolidating the political frameworks earlier worked out by emerging local leaders and acknowledging that the capacity to govern, in Man’s formulation, “compelled [Crown, company, or proprietary] recognition of the indigenous structures of colonial government that had emerged out of colonial conditions.” For its part, the Crown remained suspicious of representative government, not officially acknowledging the permanence of the assembly in Virginia until 1639, nearly fifteen years after it had assumed direct governmental responsibility for that colony.15 By the end of the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the tradition of consensual governance was “firmly rooted” in colonial English America.16 Moreover, once their governments had acquired a bicameral form, provincial magnates had no difficulty in noting “the remarkable resemblance” between colonial polities and the traditional form of metropolitan English governance, and they began, as did the Barbadian government in 1651, to defend the polities they had created on the grounds that they represented “the nearest model of conformity to that under which our predecessors of the English nation have lived and flourished for above a thousand years.” English officials were also impressed by the structural similarities


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between the colonial polities and the metropolitan government. At the same time, the enunciation and proliferation in England of the classical theory of mixed government during and after the English Civil War and its rapid installation as the official interpretation of the English constitution provided additional justification for the application of that theory to the “indigenous colonial tri-partite government of governor, council, and assembly.” The Stuart monarchy provided “official sanction” for this “conceptual transformation” in 1661 when it “introduced just such a government in Jamaica,” then recently captured from the Spanish and only the second English colony to come under royal control, instructing its new governor “to proceed ‘according to such good, just and reasonable customs and institutions as are exercised and settled in our colonies and plantations.’ ”17 Yet, this action with regard to Jamaica did not completely settle the issue of the structure of English colonial governance. Most of the new proprietary colonies created during the Restoration—in the Carolinas, the Jerseys, and Pennsylvania—and the new royal colony of New Hampshire, separated from Massachusetts in 1679, quickly moved to institute the sort of tripartite polities that had developed in the older colonies, but the Duke of York, the future James II and the proprietor of the colony of New York, captured from the Dutch in the mid-1660s, resisted the creation of an assembly for nearly twenty years until 1683, and immediately reversed this concession when he became king. Moreover, James II’s attempt to consolidate the New England colonies into a single polity, the Dominion of New England, without representative institutions, deeply threatened the longestablished tradition of representative government in those colonies. Such actions were part of an effort by English officials during the Restoration to impose metropolitan authority upon the local centers of power that had emerged in America. Throughout the decades from 1660 to 1690, the metropolitan government undertook a variety of measures intended to reduce the colonies to what it called “an absolute obedience to the King’s authority.”18 These included the subordination of the economies of the colonies to that of the metropolis through the navigation acts, passed between 1651 and 1696; bringing as many as possible of the still mostly private colonies under the direct control of the Crown, and curtailing the powers of colonial political institutions. As a theoretical support for these efforts, metropolitan officials in the late 1670s enunciated the new doctrine that the extension of representative government to the colonies was an act of royal grace. Everywhere in the colonies, these metropolitan intrusions into colonial affairs encountered stiff resistance. In response, provincial assemblies

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expressed the determination of the property holders they represented to secure both their estates and their claims to an English identity by obtaining metropolitan recognition that, as English people or the descendants of English people, they were entitled to enjoy all the rights and legal protections of English people in the home island. This determination stimulated an extensive constitutional discussion intended to identify explicit legal defenses that would put colonial claims to English rights and legal protections on a solid foundation and thereby protect the colonies from such wholesale intrusions of metropolitan power.19 In these discussions, colonial spokesmen articulated an elaborate argument designed to strengthen their early claims to what they thought of as their inherited rights as English people. According to this argument, the original settlers and their descendants were all equally free-born English subjects who had left their native country to establish English hegemony over portions of the New World. Denying that they could lose any of their inherited rights simply by migrating to America, they pointed out that they had created their own civil governments with the specific purpose of securing those rights to themselves. At the same time, they argued that, so far from being a grant from the Crown, their assemblies derived from their basic English right to representative government and many decades of customary practice. Like Magna Charta itself, they contended, no charter or other instrument could grant English people a right which they already enjoyed as part of their inheritance. Such instruments, like Magna Charta, merely constituted an acknowledgment on the part of the Crown that such rights inhered in the people themselves. In the colonies, no less than in the metropolis, they thus insisted, parliaments were the bulwark of the people’s liberties and properties. Although the legal status of the assemblies remained a subject of dispute down to and after the American Revolution, the Glorious Revolution effectively ended any efforts to do away with representative government in the colonies. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, representative assemblies had become a fixed feature of English colonial governance. Some of the earliest colonies lost their separate status over the course of the seventeenth century, Plymouth amalgamating with Massachusetts and New Haven with Connecticut, and East Jersey and West Jersey joining to form the single colony of New Jersey. Every one of the eighteen settled colonies still in existence in 1700 had its own elected legislature. Thereafter, each new British colony acquired an assembly as soon as it had sufficient settlers to support one, including the Bahamas in 1729, Georgia in 1755, and Nova Scotia in 1758. In 1749, the Boston essayist and historian Dr. William Douglass could


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credibly refer those few English “Settlements with a Governor only . . . such [as] . . . Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Hudson’s Bay, and Georgia,” as “not [yet fully] colonized.” Because they had no assembly, these plantations, according to Douglass, lacked the “Essence of a British Constitution.”20 With the notable exception of Quebec, whose majority French population initially showed little interest in adapting to English political institutions, all of the new colonies acquired as a result of the Seven Years’ War–East Florida, West Florida, Grenada, St. Vincent, Tobago, and Dominica—established assemblies in the 1760s and 1770s. The new colony of St. John had an assembly soon after it was established in 1773. By the time of the American Revolution, twenty-five provincial parliaments, not counting the Irish Parliament, were functioning in the British overseas world. Already by 1700, the assemblies in the older colonies had “achieved a position, if not superior to, at least parallel to and independent from” the governors and councils.21 In most cases, they had gained a degree of independence, customary assurances of frequent elections, and traditions of regularity of meetings that exceeded those characteristic of the House of Commons before the Glorious Revolution. As during the eighteenth century, the growing complexities of the political process made them indispensable to the functioning of the colonial polities, the assemblies met more regularly and for longer periods, passed a greater quantity of less ambiguous legislation, defined their procedures more clearly, established permanent standing committees, exhibited more continuity of leadership, developed a much more articulate sense of their corporate rights; abandoned their judicial functions in favor of executive and administrative ones, and otherwise sought to give substance to the ideal that, as the sole givers of all statutory law operating inside a colony and as the presumed equivalents of the House of Commons, they were endowed with charismatic authority and held in trusteeship all of the sacred rights and privileges of the public. Already powerful by the last decades of the seventeenth century, the assemblies got still stronger during the eighteenth century. To model themselves as closely as possible after the English House of Commons became a conscious goal. In this effort, they had many sources to draw upon, including the several parliamentary commentaries and procedural books published in the seventeenth century. Working out the logic of the analogy between the assemblies and the House of Commons, colonial legislative leaders not only copied the forms and procedures of the metropolitan body but insisted that they were constitutionally vested with the same powers and privileges in the colonies as was the House of Commons in Britain.22

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Notwithstanding this powerful mimetic impulse, colonial legislative development, however, diverged considerably from that of the parent state. Having exercised wide authority over revenues from their earliest days, colonial legislatures gradually refined and extended that authority over every phase of raising and distributing public revenue. They acquired a large measure of legislative independence by winning control over their procedures and obtaining guarantees of basic English parliamentary privileges, and they extended their power well beyond that of the House of Commons by gaining extensive authority in handling executive affairs, including the right to appoint most officials concerned with the collection of provincial revenues and many other executive officers and to participate in formulating executive policy. In still other ways, their development differed from that of the House of Commons. Elections were more frequent, residential requirements for legislative seats were the norm, most colonies paid their representatives for their services as legislators and endeavored, in many colonies successfully, to exclude placemen from holding legislative seats, and representatives were far more closely monitored by their constituents in electoral environments in which a vastly higher proportion of the adult male inhabitants met franchise requirements.23 For virtually the whole of the first 150 years of British overseas colonization in the Americas, the colonies, as Smith emphasized in the passage quoted at the beginning of this paper, had enjoyed an astonishing measure of self-government, and, in the English tradition, selfgovernment meant representative government. “From the earliest and first instance of the establishment of a BRITISH SENATE,” declared the political writer Thomas Pownall in the mid-1760s, “the principle of establishing the Imperium of government, on the basis of a representative legislature” had been the defining feature of British governance.24 “By extending this beautiful part of our constitution” to the colonies, George Dempster told the House of Commons in October 1775, “our wise ancestors have bound together the different and distant parts of this mighty empire” and “diffused in a most unexampled manner the blessings of liberty and good government through our remotest provinces.”25 By thus permitting the colonies to adopt “the form of its own government,” observed Montesquieu, Britain had effectively insured that the colonies would prosper, that “great peoples” would “emerge” from the forests and islands to which their ancestors had migrated, and that the colonists would be able to think of themselves and be thought of by others as “intrinsically British.”26 Contemporary commentators had no doubt that Britain had, as Adam Smith said, “dealt more liberally with her colonies than [had] any


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other nation.” No other European state seemed to have extended its colonists so much “liberty to manage their own affairs their own way.”27 “The Case of a Free country branching itself out in the manner Britain has done and sending to a distant world colonies which have there, from small beginnings and under free legislatures of their own, increased and formed a body of powerful states,” said the philosopher Richard Price, echoing Adam Smith, was unprecedented “in the history of mankind.”28 Yet, if the system of negotiated authority that characterized imperial governance in the early modern British Empire was distinctively British in its dispersal of power to parliamentary institutions, it was by no means peculiar among early modern empires. Over the past quarter century, the revival of interest in the process of state formation in early modern Europe has considerably altered the way historians think about the process of governance in early modern empires. Among other things, this literature has shown that the early modern state, always limited in its fiscal, administrative, and coercive resources, was characterized by systems of indirect governance and fragmented sovereignties. The products of a process of state building in which authority had not flowed from the center outward to the periphery but had been constructed out of an ongoing series of negotiations, of reciprocal bargaining, among the center and the peripheries, these systems involved some concentration of power in agencies of the central state but also left considerable authority in the hands of the principal holders of power in the peripheries.29 Early modern empires in the Americas were similarly constructed. In those empires, fiscal resources were never sufficient, not even in the case of the Spanish, to support the bureaucratic, military, and naval machinery necessary to impose central authority from above without the consent or acquiescence of the dominant self-empowered possessing classes in the peripheries. To obtain the consent or cooperation of those classes, metropolitan officials had little choice but to negotiate systems of authority with them. This bargaining process, so similar to that which characterized state formation within early modern Europe, produced varieties of indirect rule that at once set clear boundaries on central power, recognized the rights of localities and provinces to varying degrees of self-government, and ensured that in normal circumstances metropolitan decisions affecting the peripheries would consult or respect local and provincial interests. Formal representative institutions of the kind that developed in the English colonies were unnecessary for consensual governance. Infiltration of the agencies of colonial administration by members of colonial elite, and the naturalization of officials sent from the center

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further enhanced the influence of the peripheries in imperial governance during the early modern era. So long as metropolitan officials did not violate established systems of negotiated authority and respected the delicate balance between central and peripheral interests on which those systems were based, these processes of infiltration and naturalization could function to help hold extended polities together and even to bolster central authority within them. When, however, metropolitan officials violated those established systems of authority, as did both the British and the Spanish during the last half of the eighteenth century, they encountered the powerful resistance that between 1775 and 1825 tore those polities asunder and led to the creation of new independent states in the Americas.30

Notes 1. Adams Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [1776], in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1976–83), 2, pp. 572, 583–85. 2. Edmund and William Burke, An Account of the European Settlements in America, 2 vols. (London, 1757), 2, p. 288. 3. Jorg Frisch, “Law as a Means and as an End: Remarks on the Function of European and Non-European Law in the Process of European Expansion,” in European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Law in 19th and 20th-Century Asia and Africa, ed. W.J. Mommsen and J.A. De Moor (Oxford, 1992), p. 21. 4. See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992); Linda Colley, The Britons: Forging the Nations, 1707–1787 (New Haven, 1992); and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). 5. The best analysis of this tradition is still to be found in J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, UK, 1957). 6. Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae (Cambridge, UK, 1942), pp. 25, 27, 31, 33, 79, and 81. 7. Henry Care, English Liberties, 5th ed. (Boston, 1721), pp. 3–4, 27. 8. George Dargo, Roots of the Republic: A New Perspective on Early American Constitutionalism (New York, 1974), p. 58. 9. Yunlong Man, “English Colonization and the Formation of AngloAmerican Polities, 1606–1664,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University (1994), pp. 17–61, 455. 10. Ordinance, July 24, 1621, Virginia Laws, March 1624, in Great Britain and the American Colonies, 1606–1783 ed. Jack P. Greene (New York, 1970), pp. 28, 30.


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11. David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (New York, 1972), p. 39; “Maryland Charter, June 30, 1632,” in Great Britain and the American Colonies, ed. Greene, p. 24. 12. See Michael Kammen, Deputyes & Libertyes: The Origins of Representative Government in Colonial America (New York, 1969), pp. 11–12. 13. Ibid., pp. 7, 9, 62, 67. 14. Ibid., p. 11. 15. Man, “English Colonization,” pp. 232–414, traces these developments in detail. The quotations are from pp. 416, 455. 16. Kammen, Deputyes & Liberties, p. 61. 17. Man, “English Colonization,” pp. 15–16, 391–92. 18. Report of the Commissioners sent to New England, [April 30] 1661, in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial 1661–68, 44 vols., ed. W. Noel Sainsbury et al.(London, Stationary Office, 1860), p. 25. 19. This subject is discussed more fully in Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States 1607–1788 (Athens, GA, 1986), pp. 12–18. 20. William Douglass, Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvement, and Present State of the British Settlements in North America, 2 vols. (London, 1749–51), 1, p. 207. 21. Man, “English Colonization,” p. 391. 22. See Jack P. Greene, “Political Mimesis: A Consideration of the Historical and Cultural Roots of Legislative Behavior in the Eighteenth Century,” American Historical Review 75 (1969), pp. 337–67. 23. On these points, see Robert J. Dinkin, Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689–1776 (Westport, 1977); Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York, 1988); J.R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (New York, 1966), and The Gift of Government: Political Responsibility from the English Restoration to American Independence (Athens, GA, 1983); Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (Chapel Hill, 1963); and Mary Patterson Clarke, Parliamentary Privilege in the American Colonies (New Haven, 1943). 24. Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies, 4th ed. (London: J. Walter, 1768), p. 175. 25. George Dempster, speech, October 27, 1775, in Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliament Respecting North America, 1754–1783, 6 vols., ed. Richard Simmons and P.D.G. Thomas (Millwood, NY, 1982–87), 6, p. 640. 26. Quoted in Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge, UK, 1961), pp. 92, 297. 27. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2, pp. 572, 573–85. 28. Bernard Peach, ed., Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution (Durham, NC, 1979), p. 82.

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29. The foundational works are Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, MA, 1990) and Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe, ed. Mark Greengrass (London, 1991). 30. For an elaboration of this argument, see Jack P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History, ed. Jack P. Greene (Charlottesville, 1994), pp. 1–24.

Chapter 10

Governing a Colony PA S C O M M E S L E S AU T R E S : The Dilemmas of Unpl anned C onquest Ramsay Cook

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he Seven Years’ War was one more, though it turned out to be the last, in a series of military encounters between Britain and France involving the two European nations’ colonies in North America. In earlier wars and skirmishes New France, or parts of the colony, had passed into the hands of the English, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently: Acadia in 1713, permanently and Louisburg in 1748, temporarily. The deportation of the Acadians in 1755 demonstrated that the British had good reason to know that the people of New France were French and Roman Catholic, distinguishing characteristics that could pose troubling dilemmas to an English and Protestant conqueror. When General James Wolfe recited Gray’s Elegy as his troops prepared to scale the Heights of Abraham, he did not expect the enemy to understand him; he was just trying to keep his wavering spirits up. Nor did the mutual hatred of Britain and France, that was especially intense during the eighteenth century, suggest that integrating New France into Britain’s North American empire would be an uncomplicated exercise. New France in 1760 contained some 65,000 French-speaking Catholics, whose everyday lives were regulated by a French system of laws. In 1763 they became “subjects of the King,” an English, Protestant King. Yet even in the full knowledge that the French colonies

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in North America were obviously unlike their colonial neighbors immediately to the south, the British appear to have given no serious thought to the implications of acquiring a colony pas commes les autres (not like the others). This lack of any preconquest planning is easily enough explained: “The acquisition of New France was not a major objective of Imperial ambition at the end of the Seven Years War,” P.J. Marshall has written, pointing out that the warm French sugar island of Guadeloupe was a serious alternative to the northern quelques arpents de neige. “Canada was retained to give security to the American colonies on whose behalf the war had been begun,” Marshall continues, “and possibly to ensure British domination on the rich fishing in the St. Lawrence estuary and on the Grand Banks, considered to provide crucial training grounds for British seamen.”1 The tentative nature of this acquisition by conquest is evident in the Articles of Capitulation agreed to by the two warring nations in 1760: Article XXXVI began: “If by the Treaty of Peace, Canada remains to his Britannic Majesty.” In addition to a broad amnesty, the inhabitants of New France were guaranteed two essentials of their distinct existence: (Article XXVII) “The free exercise of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion shall subsist entire . . . without being molested in any manner.” And (Article XLII) “the French Canadians shall continue to be governed according to the custom of Paris, and the laws and usages established for this country and shall not be subject to any other imposts than those which were established under the French Dominions.”2 Of course capitulation was not cession; it represented a temporary rather than a permanent status. But these concessions to the defeated population might have been less readily granted had the plan for the future been clear. For three years after 1760, New France was governed by the military under General James Murray according to the generous terms of the Articles of Capitulation. Neither deportation of the Canadians—though they were free to leave—nor the requirement of an unconditional oath of allegiance, the cause or pretext for the expulsion of the Acadians, appear anywhere in the official documents that consolidated the Conquest by 1763. Peace of Paris of that year repeated the Capitulation’s guarantee of “liberty of the Catholic religion” but added a significant qualifier: “as far as the laws of Great Britain permit.” The commitment, made in 1760, to recognize the “custom of Paris” was not duplicated.3 Next the Proclamation of 1763, “strongly assimilationist tone,”4 made provision for a civil government to replace military rule. The British now drew on the established principles of colonial governance that had evolved in the American colonies, despite their now even fuller knowledge5 that

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Quebec, as the colony was now styled, could hardly have been a more radical contrast with New England. Like other colonies acquired in the recent war, Quebec would be provided with an elected Assembly “in such Manner and Form as is used and directed in those Colonies and Provinces in America which are under our immediate government.” The governor, his Council and “the Representatives of the people” were empowered “to make, constitute and ordain Laws, Statutes and Ordinances for the Public Peace, Welfare and Good Government . . . as near as may be agreeable to the Laws of England. . . .”6 Why would a “feudal” French and Catholic colony be treated as though it were Massachusetts or New York? Or, for that matter, Nova Scotia where an elected Assembly was established in 1758, but only after the expulsion of most of the French-speaking Roman Catholic Acadians, who had twice been explicitly refused an assembly.7 Phillip Lawson has argued that the reason was ideological: eighteenth-century politicians were so entrapped in the Whig doctrines of 1689 that they could think only of enshrining the “rights of Englishmen” in Canada, even while erasing the practices of Canadians that had been set out in the Capitulations.8 That French and Catholic Grenada was placed under a similar constitutional regime may lend some credence to this argument, but in the Quebec case there is a more concrete explanation. First, without a representative assembly the British government’s hands were tied in matters of local taxation with the result that most administrative costs would fall on the British taxpayer—and did until 1791.9 Moreover, it was the intention, and expectation, of the British authorities by 1763, that Quebec would soon be the destination for substantial English, Protestant immigration from both Britain and especially from the supposedly overpopulated New England colonies. The Lords of Trade in a report made that point emphatically to the Earl of Egremont, on June 8, 1763. Incentives, in the form of land grants, were provided for in the Proclamation that followed.10 Similar expectations may explain the Grenada arrangements. The constitutional provisions of the Proclamation of 1763, then, were intended to provide a framework in which Quebec would be made over into a colony just like the others, including a “reformed” Catholic Church gradually absorbed by the Church of England.11 During the following decade that illusion was gradually dispelled.12 In reality confusion reigned almost from the outset. Despite the clear intent of the Proclamation, the first governor’s instructions allowed him to rule along with an appointed Council and delay calling an Assembly.13 Since Roman Catholics were not eligible to vote, Governor James Murray’s foot-dragging is not surprising. The calling

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of an Assembly was really postulated upon an increase in eligible, Anglophone protestant voters. Ten years later Lord Mansfield ruled Murray’s decision unconstitutional (Campbell vs. Hall), but by that time events had demonstrated the unworkability of the plan of 1763. For one thing, very few desirable new settlers arrived. Murray reported in 1764 that there were about 200 English Protestants qualified to hold office or to perform jury duty, living in the midst of some 70,000 French Canadians.14 Moreover, the governor soon developed a decidedly dim view of the few Anglophones who did arrive, especially the merchants who rushed in from New England. These merchants favored the introduction of English commercial law and they expected that an assembly would favor tax revenues from sources other than customs duties. So they demanded the promised Assembly without delay. None of this appealed to Sir James whose military temperament made him suspicious of popular assemblies and disdainful of crass commercial values. In October 1764, he offered this blunt appraisal of his “subjects” to the Lords of Trade: “Little, very little, will content the New Subjects but nothing will satisfy the Licentious Fanaticks Trading here, but the expulsion of the Canadians who are perhaps the bravest and best Race upon the Globe, a Race who cou’d they be indulged with a few privileges wch the Laws of England deny to Roman Catholicks at home, would soon get the better of every National Antipathy to their Conquerors and would become the most faithful and most useful set of Men in this American Empire.”15 Such a stereotyped assessment left little, if any, room for compromise, though by ordinance in September 1764, Murray established a system of civil courts to hear and adjudicate both civil and criminal cases in English according to English law. Though in the middle court level of Common Pleas, French laws and language were used, appeals could go to the highest court of Queen’s Bench. Legal confusion remained unresolved for the next ten years. Murray, whatever one thinks of his obvious denial of “the rights of Englishmen,” had defined the nub of the question: how could an assembly, or even a British jury system, operate in a colony where the overwhelming majority of the subjects would not submit to the Test Act? Interestingly enough, in Britain’s other newly acquired French and Catholic colony of Grenada, the Test Act was effectively set aside as early as 1765 and in 1768 the Privy Council ruled that no discrimination of religious grounds would be permitted in electing members to the recently established Assembly.16 Grenada, not Canada as is sometimes claimed, became the first British possession to suspend the Test Act and to admit Catholics to full citizenship.17


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In Quebec the conflict between Governor Murray and the New England merchants led to an almost inevitable impasse and he left the colony at the end of his mission with neither the Francophone elite nor the Anglophone merchants content with their situation. The former were concerned that any English law would erode their seigneurial rights, the latter remained convinced that only an elected assembly would allow them to protect their rights as Englishmen and advance their commercial interests. Growing discontent in the Thirteen Colonies provided the background to this impasse, a circumstance that ensured that Murray’s successor, Sir Guy Carleton, would be preoccupied with security more than “the rights of Englishman.” In almost his first comment on the colony, Carleton dismissed any remaining hopes or expectations that Quebec would ever become an English colony demographically. In his magisterial eighteenth-century prose, parts of which every Canadian school child could once quote, Carleton reported in November 1767: “The Europeans, who migrate never will prefer the long inhospitable Winters of Canada to the more cheerful Climate and more fruitful Soil of His Majesty’s Southern Provinces. . . . while this Severe Climate and the Poverty of the Country discourages all but the Natives, it’s Healthfulness is such that those multiply daily, so that, barring Catastrophe shocking to think of, this Country must, to the end of Time, be peopled by the Canadian Race, who already have taken such firm Root, and got to so great a Height, that any new Stock transplanted will be totally hid, and imperceptible amongst them, except in the Towns of Quebec and Montreal.”18 Carleton’s estimate of the future was accurate. But his military background, aristocratic ambitions—in 1786 he would become Baron Dorchester—and his obsessive concern about security against both the French in Europe and the disgruntled American colonies led him to conclude that in what he judged a stable, hierarchical Francophone society there was no need for a disruptive, troublesome representative assembly. His blanket condemnation of the policy set out in the Proclamation of 1763 was based on his belief that the pre–Conquest legal system appropriately “established Subordination, from the first to the lowest, which preserved internal Harmony.”19 Gradually Carleton’s conclusions became the policy of the Imperial authorities. Under continuing pressure from the merchant class in Quebec, a variety of alternatives were considered including, in 1769, the possibility of admitting a limited number of members of the seigneurial class to both the Governor’s Council and to an Assembly, perhaps on the model of Grenada.20 Yet the anticipated growth in the Anglophone

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population did not take place and, indeed, some British politicians now opposed the idea of British emigration to Canada.21 In 1772 Solicitor General Alex Wedderburn implicitly recognized that the plan adopted in 1763 had been wrong, “In all the British colonies,” he reported in December of that year, “. . . legislative power has been entrusted to an assembly, in analogy to the constitution of the mother country. The most obvious method would then be to pursue the same idea in Canada; but the situation in that country is peculiar.”22 In the end what the Quebec historian Pierre Tousignant called Carleton’s “feudal plan” won approval and was set out in the Quebec Act of 1774.23 That act accepted Carleton’s assessment that Quebec would remain “Canadian” for the foreseeable future. There would be no assembly. The position of the Church and the legal structure of the old regime were guaranteed, though English Criminal law was recognized. Roman Catholics were now made eligible for membership on the Governor’s Council.24 While the Quebec Act has often been described as the charter of French Canadian rights and praised for its liberality, it should be noted that no mention was made of language, something that, unlike law and religion, had never been seen by the British as an issue. And, as Hilda Neatby argued, if it is taken together with the instructions that accompanied it, the thrust of British policy remained “one of gentle but steady and determined Anglicization.”25 Strategic, not humanitarian motives pointed the way to Carleton’s new constitution. With the storm brewing in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the Thirteen Colonies, he believed he had secured Quebec. That was another illusion that would be soon tested by “the catastrophe shocking to think of.” The American Revolution and the failure of the Canadians to flock to defend Quebec against the invading armies from the south shattered Carleton’s confidence in the Canadian people. His belief that the Quebec Act, by confirming the rights of the Church and the seigneurs, guaranteed the loyalty of the whole people was demonstrably unfounded. At best neutral, at worst willing to collaborate, many habitants proved deaf to the professions of loyalty pronounced by their supposed leaders.26 Carleton was scandalized, declared martial law, and ruled sullenly and often carelessly until Sir Frederick Haldimand replaced him. Haldimand, in turn, governed with a clumsy authoritarian hand. Suspecting disloyalty everywhere, he suspended habeas corpus and held suspects, often on flimsy evidence, without trial. A particularly telling case was that of Pierre du Calvet, a French protestant merchant who had arrived in the colony shortly before it fell to the British. In


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the first years after the Conquest he worked cooperatively with the British and was appointed Justice of the Peace in 1766. When he lost that position nine years later he became a quarrelsome critic of the judicial system and associated with suspected republicans. After his arrest in 1780, on the pretext that he had collaborated with the American invasion, he remained in prison without trial for nearly three years. Released in 1783 he decided to sue Haldimand, first traveling to London to demand the governor’s recall. He published two extraordinary, polemical pamphlets in which he recounted the injustices that he and others had suffered and rudely denounced Haldimand. Appel de la Justice de l’Etat (the other was in English and entitled The Case of Pierre Du Calvet), seemingly aimed as much at the Canadians as at the British government, moved from his specific grievances and charges to a demand for a total constitutional revision that would replace the Quebec Act. His reform plan would guarantee habeas corpus and trial by jury in civil and criminal cases. Most significantly, he called for an elected assembly with power over taxation and expenditures to bind the governor to the wishes of people’s representatives. To drive his point home he emphatically noted that “la Grenade même, qui ne contient dans son sein qu’une poignée de Français, vos anciens comme vos nouveaux compatriotes, goûte, presque depuis la conquête, les fruits délicieux, d’un si avantageux gouvernement.” (Even Grenada that contains only a handful of French, your old as well as your new compatriots, tastes almost since the conquest, the delicious fruits of such an advantageous government.) With an elected Assembly, he concluded, “nous serons donc, enfin, un Peuple Anglais, c’est-à-dire libre & heureux.”27 (Thus we will finally be an English People, which is to say free and happy.) The clever reference to Grenada probably impressed his Canadian readers more than the dubious idea of becoming “un Peuple Anglais.” Alas, Du Calvet did not live to see any of his grievances resolved or his constitutional reforms enacted; he drowned following a shipwreck during another trip to Britain in 1786. His cause, however, was not a completely futile one, for his actions and his publications contributed directly to growing French and English support for the demands that he had been one of the first to articulate. The years of the American Revolution and its immediate aftermath witnessed important changes in the population of the old province of Quebec. With the victory of the colonial rebels, a flood of disaffected Loyalists entered the northern colony. Between seven and ten thousand settled in Quebec joining a Canadian population that had more than doubled since the Conquest. They would make clear their

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expectation that the “rights of Englishmen”—including an elected Assembly—should be respected.28 Moreover, old and new subjects soon began to petition the British government for change. For the first time the demand for an elected Assembly began to be made in French, as well as in English. In 1783, for example, two Canadian merchants, Jean-Baptiste Adhémar and Jean Delisle, set off to Great Britain to ask that the Canadian Church, facing a severe shortage of priests, be allowed to recruit in Europe—Haldimand had just expelled two French Sulpicians on grounds that they were French and thus untrustworthy. The mission proving fruitless, Adhémar concluded that “Soutenez la Maison d’Assemblée, c’est là l’essentiel de l’établissement légal de nos droits civils [desquels] résultera de toute nécessité celui de nos droits religieux.”29 (Support [Obtain] the House of Assembly, that is the essential for the legal establishment of our civil rights from which our religious rights by necessity will follow.) Only political power could guarantee other rights. The years that followed witnessed the beginning of an open debate about replacement of the Quebec Act and the introduction of an elected assembly. In November 1784 two nearly identical petitions were prepared, one by English-speaking merchants, the other by “le Comité Canadien,” calling for repeal of the Quebec Act, the establishment of an assembly in which old and new (English and French) subjects would be represented. Additional demands included a continuation of the Council, retention of English criminal law, French civil law, some English commercial law and a clear statement of habeas corpus as a constitutional right. A combined version of these petitions that was dispatched to London in January 1785 contained 855 English signatures and 1436 French.30 The constitutional reform movement, once identified exclusively with the English—partly because only the English version of the petition was published in the standard documentary series, a fact noted and corrected by Pierre Tousignant31—had clearly become bicultural, though there was still strong opposition among the seigneurs and probably among the peasantry who feared that assemblies meant increased taxation.32 Class rather than language and religion had now become the political division in constitutional matters. By the time Lord Dorchester returned to Quebec as Governor in October 1786, events both in Britain and in the colony made constitutional change almost a certainty. As calls for an assembly multiplied and unseemly squabbles in the Council discredited the existing arrangements and distressed the politicians at Westminster, the legitimacy of the system established in 1774 increasingly came into question.33 Lord Sydney, the


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Secretary of State, expected Dorchester to advise the home government about the conditions in Quebec and to offer some advice about possible change. Instead the Governor dithered and delayed and when finally, in June 1787, he offered a feeble set of observations it was clear that the old dilemma, the one he thought the Quebec Act had solved, now paralyzed him. He complained that “two parties have existed in this Province ever since the Civil Law was introduced here in ‘Sixty four, the one zealous for English law and for an Assembly, the other not less anxious to maintain the present form of Government with the Ancient laws, customs and usages of the country.”34 That summary, of course, simplified matters for the demands of the Canadians, or at least one group of them, was no longer simply for a return to the past, but rather for an assembly which, as Jean Baptiste Adhémar earlier pointed out, would give the Canadians an institution through which their “laws, customs and usages,” their distinctiveness, could be defended. Dorchester’s inability to offer any practical suggestions for change meant that the British government found it necessary to act without his advice. Decisions had to be taken that Dorchester avoided probably because he had no sympathy for the changes that were now essential. When Sydney resigned from the cabinet during the Regency crisis of 1789, a decisive and clear-minded politician, William Grenville, replaced him. Grenville at once set to work and by the autumn of that year he was ready with the proposals that would become the Constitutional Act of 1791. His solution to the dilemma so clearly set out by Dorchester was to escape through the horns that had, for three decades, appeared impregnable. First, he decided to divide the Old Province of Quebec in two: Lower Canada, where the Canadians would hold an overwhelming majority; Upper Canada where the Loyalists and other English-speaking settlers would dominate. Each colony would be granted an assembly, for long the normal practice in English colonies and now acceptable to the Canadians who would be eligible for membership. To the assembly and the governor, still armed with ample power and independent funds, would be added an executive council to advise the governor and a legislative council to counterbalance the assembly, both appointed bodies with powers that in practice amounted to a veto. The legislative councillors would hold office for life and, presumably be chosen from the elite of the colonies. Upper and Lower Canada would have what John Graves Simcoe, the first governor to take office in the western colony, called a government formed in “the image and transcript” of Great Britain. In Lower Canada, of course, that model would be modified by the existence of a French-speaking and Roman Catholic population whose “laws, customs and usages” projected a different image.

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“Mr. Grenville’s Plan” deserves several comments. First, Grenville claimed that the lesson he had learned from the successful revolt of the Thirteen Colonies was that “it is a point of true policy to make these concessions at a time when they may be received as a matter of favor . . . rather than wait ’till they shall be extorted from us . . . by necessity.”35 Doubtless true, but it seems equally clear, given the rigorous checks that were intentionally placed on the elected assembly, that another lesson had also been learned: assemblies must not be allowed to get out of hand as some had been in the Thirteen Colonies. Hence, the counterweight of the “aristocratic” upper house. Second, Grenville observed in the debate on the Constitutional Act that “Canada stood in a different situation from the other British possessions in America.”36 In a lengthy despatch to Dorchester on October 20, 1789 he had explained his position this way “. . . a considerable degree of attention is due to the prejudices and habits of the French Inhabitants who compose so large a proportion of the community, and every degree of caution should be used to continue to them the enjoyment of those civil and religious Rights which were secured to them by the Capitulation of the Province, or have since been granted by the liberal and enlightened spirit of the British Government.” Division of the colony ensured that this would be the case. That, he added, was seen as an immediate necessity “before sufficient time has been allowed for the removal of antient prejudices, by the habit of obedience to the same Government, and by the sense of common interest.”37 The Prime Minister, William Pitt, articulated a similar distinction between immediate and longer-term goals, or at least hopes, in his defense of the measure. The Bill recognized “that there was no probability of reconciling the jarring interests and opposing views of the inhabitants” except “to divide the province, and to contrive that one division should consist, as much as possible, of those who were well inclined towards the English laws, and that the other part should consist of a decided preponderancy of the ancient inhabitants, who were attached to the French laws.”38 Here, then, was what appeared to be an explicit reversal of a goal that had influenced British policy toward Canada since 1763, namely, that the French culture would be assimilated into English culture. The facts on the ground trumped ideological preference. Yet, Pitt also advanced a second reason for supporting the measure in 1791 that seemingly contradicted the first. To Charles James Fox’s contention that the best outcome in Canada would be “that the different distinctions of the people might be extinguished forever,”39


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Pitt replied that the partition of the colony had been decided upon exactly with that purpose in mind. “The French subjects,” he argued, “would be sensible that the British Government had no intention of forcing the English laws upon them, and therefore they would, with more facility, look at the operation and effect of those laws, compare them with the operation and effect of their own, and probably in time adopt them from conviction.”40 Perhaps this argument was merely one of convenience, designed to quiet the fears of those in parliament and outside who were uneasy about a plan that accepted Catholic emancipation and elements of the culture of Britain’s traditional enemy. The Boston-born Attorney General, James Monk, for example, had warned in late 1788 that “A House of Assembly, unlimited in its power, unsecured to the Protestant interest and the King’s old subjects, would be a real curse on the colony and what Great Britain ought never to grant.”41 Moreover, there were certain aspects of the 1791 legislation that suggested that the idea of assimilation had not been entirely abandoned, that “antient prejudices” would eventually disappear. As in all previous constitutional arrangements since 1760, the Constitutional Act was silent on the matter of language, an issue that was not addressed until Lord Durham’s Report in 1839 explicitly recommended assimilation of the French Canadians and the subsequent Union Act of 1841 prohibited the use of French in the Legislature. The 1791 Constitutional Act made the Church of England, endowed with generous lands as Clergy Reserves, the established church of Lower as well as Upper Canada. And soon after the new constitution was implemented, the Royal Institute for the Advancement of Learning, a secular English language institution, was arguably established to advance the process of assimilation. The conclusion seems obvious enough: on the matter of the long-term future of the Canadians the policy goals of 1791 were at best ambiguous.

Some Last Thoughts The Constitutional Act of 1791 that introduced an eighteenth-century version of parliamentary government to Canada, thirty years after it became part of the British Empire, represented a realistic compromise between pragmatism and constitutional principle. In accepting Quebec as a colony pas commes les autres, a means was found of implementing the principle that “the rights of Englishmen” should be recognized in a British colony and that those rights could be extended to Canadians whose language, religion, and laws were distinctive. In broader Imperial terms not too much should be made of this, of

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course, since the year after the Constitutional Act accepted the idea of full citizenship for French-speaking Catholics, those rights were taken away from the French-speaking Catholics in Grenada who had enjoyed them for 25 years. The Grenadian historian Beverley Steele’s comment that “Roman Catholics in Grenada should be treated as Roman Catholics in Britain, and not as in Canada ” may also remind us that when the Irish Parliament, “Grattan’s Parliament,” was folded into the Union of 1800, the Test Act remained unchanged.42 So one may ask, why was the Canadian outcome different? In the opening scene of Denis Arcand’s remarkable film script, Le Déclin de l’Empire Américan (The Decline of the American Empire), a history professor informs his students that “Il y a trois choses importantes en histoire. Premièrement, le nombre. Deuxièmement, le nombre. Troisièmement, le nombre.”43 (In history there are three important things. First, number. Second, number. Third, number.) The scene is fictional, but the aphorism was coined by the late Professor Michel Brunet, a specialist in late eighteenth-century Quebec history,44 to explain to his students both the survival of French Canadian culture and the continuing threats to it. Certainly, number is fundamental to any explanation of the constitutional evolution of Canada between 1760 and 1791: making Canada into Massachusetts or Nova Scotia was impossible given the meagre size—even after 1783—of Anglophone immigration compared with the soaring birthrate of the Canadians—la revanche des berceaux (“the revenge of the cradle”)—as it came to be called. By the time that population imbalance began to even out and then tip in favor of Anglophones, the assimilation game had been lost. Ironically it was lost partly because the Constitutional Act had given French Canadians parliamentary institutions. “L’introduction du gouvernement représentatif en Canada est l’un des événements les plus remarquables de notre histoire,” (The introduction of representative government in Canada is one of the most remarkable events in our history) wrote François-Xavier Garneau, French Canada’s first nationalist historian, in the mid-1840s, “. . . le degré de liberté qu’elle établit donna du moins à nos péres un moyen d’exposer leurs sentiments et leurs besoins.”45 (. . . the degree of liberty that it established at least gave our fathers a means of expounding their feelings and their needs.) The elected French Canadian politicians quickly learned the rules of the parliamentary game and defended their interests skillfully in the Assembly, beginning by establishing a de facto right to speak French.46 Pitt’s prediction that the French-speaking Canadians would become so enamored of British institutions that they would jettison their own, in hindsight, proved ironic. French


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Canadians rather than being assimilated, assimilated parliamentary institutions and made them their own. That assimilation is dramatically illustrated by a nineteenth-century French Canadian intellectual’s reinvention of parliamentary history. In Les Quelques Considérations sur Rapports de La Sociéte Civile avec La Réligion et la Famille, a book written in 1866 to urge his compatriots to support Confederation, the ultramontane bishop of Trois Rivières, Msgr. Laflèche, observed that . . . ces institutions et la forme du gouvernement qui ont fait la force, la grandeur et la gloire de l’Angleterre, sont un legs de l’un de ses plus grands rois, le pieux et fervent catholique Alfred-le-Grand. Cet homme de génie avait compris et admiré la beauté et la force de la constitution du gouvernement de l’Eglise catholique. Il essaya de l’appliquer au gouvernement de la nation que la divine Providence l’avait chargé de gouverner. C’est là l’origine et le modèle de la constitution anglaise.”47 [. . . these institutions and the form of government which have made the strength, the greatness and the glory of England are the legacy of one of the greatest of the kings, the pious and fervent Catholic Alfred the Great. This man of genius understood and admired the beauty and the strength of the constitution of the government of the Catholic church. He tried to apply it to the government of the nation that divine providence had charged him to rule. That is the origin and the model of the English constitution.]

A history of parliament pas comme les autres, for a people not like others.

Notes 1. P.J. Marshall, “British North America, 1760–1815,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, II, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall (Oxford,1998), p. 374. 2. Adam Shortt and Arthur G. Doughty, eds., Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada 1759–1791, 2nd and rev. ed., Part I (Ottawa, 1918), pp. 30, 32, 34 (hereafter cited as Shortt and Doughty). 3. Ibid., p. 115. 4. P.J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America ca. 1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005), p. 187. 5. See for example “General Murray’s Report on the State of the Government of Quebec in Canada June 5th, 1762” in Shortt and Doughty, Documents, pp. 47–81. 6. Ibid., p. 165.

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7. W.S. McNutt, The Atlantic Provinces: The Emergence of Colonial Society (Toronto, 1965), p. 58. 8. Phillip Lawson, The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution (Montreal and Kingston, 1989), passim. 9. Hilda Neatby, Quebec: The Revolutionary Age 1760–1791 (Toronto, 1966), pp. 94–96, 258. 10. Shortt and Doughty, Documents, pp. 137, 165–66. 11. Peter M. Doll, Revolution, Religion and National Identity Imperial Anglicanism in British North America, 1745–1795 (Madison, 2000), pp. 114–22. 12. Neatby, Quebec, p. 46. 13. Shortt and Doughty, Documents, p. 176. 14. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The Triumphant Empire New Responsibilities Within an Enlarged Empire 1763–66 (New York, 1956), p. 166. 15. Shortt and Doughty, Documents, p. 231. 16. Gipson, Triumphant Empire, p. 272; Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided the American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000), pp. 124–26. 17. Beverley Steele, Grenada A History of its People (Oxford, 2003), p. 76. 18. Shortt and Doughty, Documents, p. 284. 19. Ibid., p. 289. See Jean-Marie Fecteau and Douglas Hay, “ ‘Government by Will and Pleasure Instead of Law’: Military Justice and the Legal System in Quebec, 1775–83,” in Canadian State Trials Law Politics and Security Measures, 1608–1837, ed. F. Murray Greenwood and Barry Wright (Toronto, 1996) cited in footnote 6, p. 132. 20. Gipson, Triumphant Empire, pp. 269–70. 21. Marshall, Making and Unmaking, pp. 322–25. 22. Shortt and Doughty, Documents, p. 425. 23. Pierre Tousignant, “The Integration of the Province of Quebec into the British Empire, 1763–91: Part I; ‘From the Royal Proclamation to the Quebec Act,’” Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto, 1979), IV; ibid., XXXII–XLIX; Pierre Tousignant, “La Genèse et L’Avenement de la Constitution de 1791,” thèse presentée à la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Montréal, 1971. 24. Shortt and Doughty, Documents, pp. 570–76. 25. Neatby, Quebec, p. 140; Shortt and Doughty, Documents, pp. 594–614; Doll, Revolution, pp. 151–53. 26. Gustav Lanctôt, Le Canada et la Révolution Américaine (Montreal, 1965), p. 75 et seq. 27. Appel de la Justice de l’Etat, Pierre Du Calvet (London, 1784), pp. 209–10 (I have modernized the spelling). 28. See, for example, the 1785 Loyalist petition in Short and Doughty, Documents, II, pp. 772–74. 29. Tousignant, “La Génese,” cited p. 291. 30. Ibid., pp. 306–7.


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31. Shortt and Doughty, Documents, pp. 742–52; Tousignant, “La Gènese,” p. 312. 32. Neatby, Quebec, p. 253. 33. Short and Doughty, Documents, pp. 863–64. 34. Ibid., p. 866. 35. Neatby, Quebec, cited p. 258. 36. Tousignant, “La Gènese,” cited p. 440. 37. Shortt and Doughty, Documents, p. 988. 38. The Parliamentary Register XXIX, May 11, 1791, p. 379. My italics. 39. Ibid., April 8, 1791, p. 73. 40. Ibid., pp. 76–77. 41. Neatby, Quebec, cited p. 256. 42. Steele, Grenada, p. 107; R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London, 1989), pp. 282–85. 43. Denis Arcand, Le Déclin de l’Empire Américan (Montréal, 1986), p. 11. 44. Michel Brunet, Les Canadiens après la Conquête 1759–1775 (Montréal, 1969). 45. François-Xavier Garneau, Histoire du Canada, 5th ed. (Paris, 1920), 2, p. 431. 46. Lawrence A.H. Smith, “Le Canadien and the British Constitution, 1806–1810,” Canadian Historical Review XXXVIII, June 2, 1957, pp. 93–108. 47. Abbé L. Laflèche, Quelques Considérations sur les Rapports de La Société Civile avec La Réligion et La Famille (Montreal, 1866), p. 74.

Select Bibliography Sources Brunet, Michel. Les canadiens après la Conquête 1759–1755. Montreal, 1969. Lawson, Phillip. The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution (Montreal and Kingston, 1989). Marshall, P.J. “British North America 1760–1815” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, II, The Eighteenth Century. Ed. P.J. Marshall. Oxford, 1988. Neatby, Hilda. Quebec: The Revolutionary Age 1760–1791. Toronto, 1966. Shortt, Adam and Arthur G. Doughty. Eds., Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada 1759–1791, 2 vols., 2nd rev. ed. (Ottawa, 1918). Tousignant, Pierre. “Problematique pour une Nouvelle Approche de la Constitution de 1791.” Revue d’Histoire de l’Amérique française, 27 (September 2, 1973): 181–234. ———. “La Genèse et l’Avenement de la Constitution de 1791,” thèse presentée à la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Montréal, 1971.


Conclusion

New Approaches to Early Modern R epresentation Steven Pincus

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arliamentary representation has long been at the center of a multidisciplinary discussion of the onset of modernity. It was in the early modern period, we were told by the modernization theorists of the 1950s and 1960s that Europeans developed more or less simultaneously modern bureaucratic states and modern forms of political engagement. Robust states emerged throughout Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of the increased size and velocity of early modern warfare. Charles Tilly has, for example, maintained that between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries “national states” became the modal state form in Europe.1 This was a period in which “states created mass armies and navies drawn increasingly from their own national populations, while sovereigns absorbed armed forces directly into the state’s administrative structure, and similarly took over the direct operation of the fiscal apparatus, drastically curtailing the involvement of independent contractors.”2 The military revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth century dramatically transformed the nature of the state. Contemporaries were well aware of this transformation. “Trade was in all ages till within little more than a hundred years past counted a contemptible thing, as it is still by some mighty and famous kingdoms, and is indeed but a modern system of politics, little descanted on by the great writers and professors of that science,” noted one late seventeenth

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century observer. This was because “since the discovery of the East and West Indies, and increase in navigation thereon, the state of Europe in general, and every nation in it in particular, is much altered, more especially in the course of war.” “Now,” this polemicist observed, “we see all corners of Europe crowded with listed, disciplined and standing armies in pay, which as it cannot be done without huge funds of money, and the ancient demesnes of the Prince not sufficing, taxes are everywhere increased on the subject.” “Home manufactures and foreign trade” were essential to raise the newly required revenue.3 Many of the participants in this volume have highlighted this decisive shift in the nature of the state in the early modern period. Knud Jespersen has carefully detailed the different paths taken by the Danish and Swedish states in response to the Thirty Years War and their own Baltic conflicts. Jack Greene has reminded us that early modern state formation was never a purely top-down affair—a point that has also been made by Steve Hindle, Mike Braddick, and Michel Foucault. Paul Seaward has detailed how the emergence of a strong state in early modern Britain raised questions of political accountability. Taken together these chapters ask us to reconsider the question which has dominated the literature on state formation ever since Barrington Moore’s seminal Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966): why in the transition from “the pre-industrial to the modern world” did “Western parliamentary versions of democracy” emerge in some cases and “dictatorships of the right and left” in others?4 The emergence of democracy, it seems to me, has been a second theme running through this volume. Democratization has been one of the liveliest areas of research in the social sciences at least since the publication of Seymour Martin Lipset’s pathbreaking “Some Social Requisites of Democracy” in 1959. In that wide-ranging essay Lipset sought to explicate “the social conditions which serve to support a democratic political system.” He found that “factors subsumed under economic development carry with it the political correlate of democracy.” Socioeconomic modernization made democratization more likely (though not inevitable).5 Like most modernization stories, Lipset’s has come under critical review. In an influential article “Modernization: Theories and Facts” Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi have shown that “the emergence of democracy is not a by-product of economic development. Democracy is or is not established by political actors pursuing their goals, and it can be initiated at any level of development.”6 More recently still Susan Stokes and Carles Boix have persuasively resurrected Lipset’s original

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hypothesis, insisting “that economic development both causes democracy and sustains it.”7 It is important to note in considering this debate that Lipset was careful and explicit in his definition of democracy. He did not mean by democracy the notion that “all adults have the right to elect members of the nation’s legislature.”8 Instead Lipset defined democracy “as a political system which supplies regular constitutional opportunities for changing the government officials.”9 A political system in which women are denied the right to vote, or in which there are property prerequisites to voting is not deemed undemocratic in his view. It is worth noting that the more stringent definition of democracy would possibly exclude the United States from being a democracy since millions of alien workers cannot vote, registration requirements effectively deny a large percentage of working class Americans the franchise, and the vast majority of American citizens live in congressional districts which are intentionally and structurally non-competitive. It is important to note that the literature on democratization is not historical in two senses. The scholarship has had little if any impact on historians, and the data from which the debate is drawn goes back no further than 1850. Impressionistically, some of these chapters suggest that the relevance of Lipset’s hypothesis is worth testing for the early modern period. Jespersen has suggested that the Swedish state was more representative than the Danish one in part because of its different economic situation. José Ignacio Fortea Pérez has traced the demise of the Castilian Cortes just as Spain was becoming a comparative economic backwater. Representative institutions survived in Britain and the Netherlands—and indeed augmented their legislative ambit—at the point when those two states had, according to North and Thomas for “the first time in the history of Western Europe . . . succeeded in increasing the per capita income of a growing population despite the continued pressure of diminishing returns in agriculture.”10 Of course, measures of economic growth in the early modern period are extremely blunt instruments. One is still left wondering why Sweden had a vibrant two-party political system in the eighteenth century when France, which enjoyed a more dynamic and much larger economy did not. There are, in fact, problems with the classic unilinear modernization stories made fashionable in the decade following Lipset’s essay. In one of the more sophisticated and breathtakingly wide-ranging works in the genre, Daniel Lerner argued that modernization involved “a regular sequence of three phases: Urbanization comes first, for cities alone have developed the complex of skills and resources which

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characterize the modern industrial economy. Within this urban matrix develop both of the attributes which distinguish the next two phases—literacy and media growth . . . . Not until the third phase, when the elaborate technology of industrial development is fairly well advanced, does a society begin to produce newspapers, radio networks, and motion pictures on a massive scale. This, in turn, accelerates spread of literacy. Out of this interaction develop those institutions of participation (e.g. voting) which we find in all advanced modern societies.”11 Lerner was writing about the contemporary Middle East, so we can forgive him his references to motion pictures and radio, while still noticing the relevance for early modernists of his observations about urbanization and media development. Indeed, Lerner’s phase three in the process of modernization sounds remarkably like Benedict Anderson’s “print capitalism.” This, in Anderson’s view, “set the stage” not for mass democratic voting but for “the modern nation.”12 Modernization theorists, I am suggesting, were right to argue that a profound change took place in political representation in the period covered by this volume. But they were wrong to assume that economic development and the growing scale of warfare would lead ineluctably to parliamentary democracies. There were two possible theories of representation—both of them modern—that emerged in our period. One theory was based on the notion that the representative would need to discover the relevant state interest at any given moment through balancing competing passions and interests. This state or national interest could only be discovered through the cut and thrust of political discussion—in coffee houses, in the market place, and in Parliaments. Changing circumstances would necessarily alter that interest—the rise and fall of particular industries, the emergence of new international geopolitical competition, the development of new moral threats. The national interest is ever-changing and always needs to be discovered.13 Second was the claim that a unified national interest, that was timeless, was known by all within the nation who were not hopelessly corrupt. While much weight has traditionally been placed on the survival of representative institutions in some places and their demise in others, this schema obscures the profound changes in the early modern state highlighted by state formation theorists. The Scottish Parliaments described by Keith Brown—at least until the 1640s—met irregularly and served a consultative rather than a legislative role.14 Jane Ohlmeyer has shown that the Irish Parliament “met infrequently in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” When it did legislate, as under Wentworth in the 1630s, it was

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mostly to raise money for the king. The wide range of economic legislation that characterized the activities of the Scottish and English Parliaments in the 1690s had not yet occurred. Indeed one wishes that Ohlmeyer had taken her story into the 1690s. Ireland’s fantastic economic growth in the later seventeenth century—stunted in part by Tyrconnel’s confessional polities and devastated by the Patriot Parliament’s myopic monetary policies gave birth to a multi-confessional desire for expanded representation. This desire was ultimately sacrificed to the political might of the Ulster Presbyterians—against William’s wishes—in the aftermath of the Boyne. The point is that Parliamentary institutions were fundamentally altered over the course of the seventeenth century. Not only did the French Estates General cease to meet after 1614, not only did the Castilian Cortes cease to meet after the death of Philip IV, but Parliaments in England, Scotland and Ireland were fundamentally changed after the 1640s. The English Parliament after 1688, and the British parliament after 1707, was an institution rather than an event, and legislated more broadly over matters that required the balancing of passions and interests. Earlier parliaments or Estates General voted money and aired grievances—their primary function was not to pass public legislation. Even in the German ecclesiastical principalities, as Ronald Asch has demonstrated, the noble elite adopted “the life style and habits of an urban rentier class”—they had become bourgeois legislators. David Hume was right to suggest in the middle of the eighteenth century that “trade was never esteemed an affair of state till the last century; and there scarce is any ancient writer on politics who has made mention of it. . . . The great opulence, grandeur, and military achievements of the two maritime powers [the English and the Dutch] seem first to have instructed mankind in the importance of an extensive commerce.”15 Harry Dickinson and David Bell have carefully shown that nationalist theories of representation were widely espoused in the eighteenth century in both Britain and France. For some in Britain, including Edmund Burke, Dickinson shows “all members represented the general, collective good of the people as a whole.” It did not matter whether particular constituencies or interests were represented, because in Burke’s words “Parliament is not a Congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good.”16 Such a view made questions of social, regional, or professional balance irrelevant. Significantly, Burke’s views were not altogether dissimilar from

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Rousseau’s concept of “the general will.” “The body politic is,” Rousseau explained in his “Discourse on Political Economy,” “a moral being that has a will; and this general will, which always tends to the preservation and the well-being of the whole and of each part, and which is the source of the laws, is, for all the members of the state, in relation to one another and to it, the rule of what is just and what unjust.”17 Since “the general will” was general there was no need to query the preferences of each individual. “How,” Rousseau acknowledged he would be asked, “can the general will be known in the cases in which it has not declared itself? Will the entire nation have to be assembled at each unanticipated event? It will be all the less necessary to assemble it, as it is not certain that its decision would be the expression of the general will; as this method is impractical with a large people, and is rarely necessary when the government is well intentioned: for the chiefs know well enough that the general will is always on the side most favorable to the public interest, that is to say, the most equitable; so that one need only be just in order to be sure of following the general will.”18 This notion of a unified moral will, as David Bell has pointed out, can be used to defend the rule by an enlightened few—or even a single exponent—as well as an entire people. These views contrasted with theories of representation based on balancing passions and interests. In England, as I have argued elsewhere, arguments for balancing of interests became popular among political radicals in the 1650s.19 William Ball was one of those who believed that “where the common interest is controverted, there they, who have the greatest interests or whom it most concerns ought to be judges primario or in the first place,” concluding that “the people of England were the primary power of laws or of law-making.”20 Ball therefore rejected a government of nobility like “the Venetian senators” in favor of one which recognized that “the common people in general have the greatest interest in their common interest, and the laws of the land most concern them, wherefore they, or their representatives, or trustees, ought to be judges.”21 “A Parliament always takes in, or is taking in all interests,” argued the author of the Grand Concernments of England optimistically, “everybody hath his stock going here, which can be said of no other power; therefore rationally may we expect it should give satisfaction to all, since it takes care of the interests of all.”22 John Locke wrote in this tradition, as did Daniel Defoe who bitterly castigated what he termed “national prejudices” in favor of balancing national interests. In France, as David Bell has made clear, Turgot and Necker also advanced theories of representation that favored the deliberative balancing of passions and interests.

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Emma Rothschild has shown that Condorcet, while rejecting the cold calculating language of Necker, also advocated a politics based on “the diversity of opinions.”23 The complexity of early modern states necessarily complicated the theoretical options. As Jack Greene, Jane Ohlmeyer, and Ramsay Cook have shown representation in the early modern British state was anything but straight-forward. The national sentiment model faced the problem of how to define the nation; the diversity of interests model left open the question of whose interests counted. In many ways the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 has proved the most enduring and successful model—despite Scottish skepticism, English opposition and Jacobite rebellions. This union was explicitly based on the notion of balancing interests within a federal union. That this was so suggests that historians would do well to reconsider Lipset’s suggestion that “federalism serves to strengthen democracy by increasing the opportunity for multiple sources of cleavage.”24 One wonders if Jack Greene is too optimistic about the possibility that “metropolitan officials” would “not violate established systems of negotiated authority and resp[ect] the delicate balance between central and peripheral interests.”25 The crisis of the late eighteenth century was not, after all, the first time that the metropole had threatened that balance. James II had succeeded in securing a King’s Bench ruling that colonials had no rights or privileges other than those graciously and temporarily granted by the crown. On that basis James created the Dominion of New England, the West Indies and India. The representational solution adopted in Canada proved doubly problematic. Not only were Canadians denied direct imperial representation, but, significantly, the division between Upper and Lower Canada was based on the notion of national difference—and enduring issue in twenty-first century Canada. Why did some states opt for the national-sentiment model and others opt for the diversity-of-interests model? Much research needs to be done to answer this question. But let me offer a hypothesis. Two competing models of political economic thinking developed in Europe at exactly the moment in which early modern states and their representative institutions changed fundamentally. One line of thought, the more familiar, understood political economic competition as a zerosum game. The proponents of this view argued that all property was landed property and was therefore necessarily finite. The interest of any state was in expanding and promoting this landed property. Since only those who owned the land promoted the true interest of the nation, and since the greater the landowner the greater his share in that interest, there was no need for balanced representation to discover the general

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will. Put another way, the people was the land, and the land was the people. This land-based political economy is usually associated with mercantilism. This land-based political economic vision was not, however, hegemonic. Adam Smith was wrong to contend that the mercantile system held the field until his day. Another approach to property was available, apparently developing first in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, later spreading to England, Scotland, Ireland, and to many other parts of Europe. This labor-based view of property held that human endeavor created wealth, and that therefore wealth was potentially infinite. Carew Reynell believed that “trade and populousness of a nation are the strength of it.”26 However, the basis of this strength, of trade and populousness, according to Reynell, was labor rather than land, manufacturing rather than raw materials. “It is the manufacturers of a commodity that is in general sale, that employs people and produces the great profit,” he explained, “although the original materials are not in the country, as silks for example, the making of which employs abundance of people and with them brings in other things by exportation.”27 “It is manufactures must do the work,” he enthused, “which will not only increase people, but also trade and advance it. It saves likewise money in our purses by lessening importation, and brings money in by exportation.”28 Manufacturing set in motion a process which rendered property infinite; trade was no longer a zero-sum game. “Where abundance of manufacturing people are, they consume and sweep away all country commodities, and the wares of ordinary retail trades, with all sorts of victuals, wearing apparel, and other necessaries, and employ abundance of handicraftsmen, in wooden and iron work for tools, and instruments that belong to their trades, and so maintain and increase abundance of husbandmen, retailers and artificers of all sorts,” Reynell detailed, “and they again increasing, take up more manufactures, and so they thrive one by another, ad infinitum.”29 “Though we are a nation already pretty substantial,” Reynell concluded, “yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer.”30 This was the view espoused by John Locke and most of the immediate post-revolutionary Whigs. Locke was sure that “if we rightly estimate things as they come to our use, and cast up the several expenses about them, what in them is purely owing to nature, and what to labour, we shall find that in most of them 99/100 are wholly to be put on the account of labour.” No wonder he was convinced that for states “the honest industry of mankind” and “numbers of men are to be preferred to largeness of dominions.”31 In other words, while Professor Dickinson is right to

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suggest that Locke wanted to restrict the franchise to men of property32—he defined property not as land, but as labor. Propertied Englishmen, in this understanding, was a very broad group indeed. This was necessarily so, because if the interest of the state was to increase the wealth or property of the state and its citizens, and if property could be created in a bewildering variety of ways, then it was necessary that the national representative pass legislation that would balance the competing interests of an array of producers. That these modern notions of representation—the nationalsentiment theory and the diversity-of-interests theory—found expression in both France and Britain in the eighteenth century suggests that the answer to our question can not be found solely on the ground of intellectual history. Indeed Knud Jespersen’s suggestion that the ultimate success of the Swedish state vis-à-vis Denmark lay in part in the different landholding patterns in the two countries, points to the conclusion that patterns of economic development played a large role in determining these political outcomes. This hypothesis is further supported by the fact that Britain and the Netherlands, where the diversity of interests model had the greatest impact, were also the leading European manufacturers from the middle of the seventeenth century. Taken together the chapters in this volume suggest some paths forward in the study of politics and representation in Early Modern Europe. Over the past several decades, it seems to me, there has been a provincializing of political history. This provincializing bears a striking resemblance to “the enclosure of social history” that Keith Wrightson warned against fifteen years ago.33 In particular, I fear, there has been a similar reaction against “interpretative models” leading to a “neglect of larger questions of conceptualization.”34 There is much to be learned from the rich and vibrant discussions of political development done by sociologists, political scientists, and economists. While some might accuse cultural historians of leaning too heavily on the work of their colleagues in social anthropology, political historians have by and large written in blissful ignorance of the work in cognate disciplines. Second, political historians have been just as guilty as social historians of “fragmentation by period.”35 Historians of Parliaments and politics more broadly have been overly content to man the walls of their own narrow chronological provinces, rarely offering an interpretative scheme that goes beyond several decades. Paul Seaward’s chapter attempts just the kind of interpretative boldness that is now called for. Political historians have been provincial in two additional ways. First, we have often assumed that our work can be done in isolation from social, economic, and cultural history. When

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we have looked to another subdiscipline it has almost invariably been to the similarly self-referential history of political thought—a subdiscipline that is only willing to locate texts within intellectual contexts. Political historians, it seems to me, should ask questions about the history of politics but should be willing to find answers in intellectual, economic, social, or cultural history indiscriminately. Finally, political history should be comparative. The conference that inspired this volume was a model for including papers on a variety of countries—a model that is too rarely followed. Knud Jespersen has highlighted the interesting questions that can be posed in well-chosen comparisons. Recent books by the historical sociologists Julia Adams36 and Phil Gorski37 on early modern state formation are also richly suggestive of the value of the comparative approach. It is striking the extent to which political historians write within the narrow provincial confines by national historical narratives. In my own field of early modern British History there has been a salutary move towards British rather than English history, but we have all too often merely replaced a Little Englandism with a Little Britainism. Even the New Atlantic History has been all too happy to exclude India and China from its imperial purview.38 It is time, I think, for political history to move beyond its provincialism and draw on the work of colleagues in other subdisciplines of history, to critically engage with the theoretical insights of other social scientists, to broaden our chronological horizons, and return to the comparative approaches taken by many of the early modern subjects we write about.39

Notes 1. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States (Oxford, 1992), p. 23. 2. Ibid., p. 29. 3. Considerations Requiring Greater Care for Trade in England (London, 1695), pp. 1–2, 11–12. 4. Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, 1966), pp. xvii, xxi. 5. Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” in American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (March 1959), pp. 72, 80. 6. Przeworski and Limongi, “Modernization: Theories and Facts,” World Politics 49, no. 2 (1997), p. 176. 7. Carles Boix and Susan Stokes “Endogenous Democratization,” World Politics 55 (July 2003), p. 545. 8. H.T. Dickinson, chapter 1 of this book.

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9. Lipset, “Some Social Requisites,” p. 71. 10. Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World. (Cambridge, UK, 1973), p. 117. 11. Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (Glencoe, 1958), p. 60. 12. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York, 1983), pp. 36, 46. 13. The most brilliant discussion of the emergence of this system of representation in the British context is Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2005). 14. Keith Brown, “Politics, Representation, and the Estates in Early Modern Scotland,” unpublished paper, Parliaments, Peoples, and Power conference, Yale University, April 2005. 15. Hume, “Of Civil Liberty,” in David Hume: Essays ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1985), pp. 88–89. 16. H.T. Dickinson, chapter 1 in this book. 17. Rousseau, “Discourse of Political Economy,” in Rousseau: The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch (Cambridge, UK, 1997), p. 6. 18. Rousseau, “Discourse of Political Economy,” p. 12. 19. “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism,” in American Historical Review, vol 103, no. 3 (June 1998), pp. 729ff. 20. William Ball, The Power of Kings Discussed (London, 1649), p. 3; William Ball, State-Maxims (1655), p. 27. 21. Ball, The Power of Kings, pp. 3, 13. 22. The Grand Concernment of England, 1659, p. 25. 23. Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments (Cambridge, MA, 2001), pp. 197–203. 24. Lipset, “Some Social Requisites,” p. 99. 25. Jack P. Greene, chapter 9 in this book. 26. Reynell, Necessary Companion (1685), p. 18. 27. Ibid., pp. 17–18. 28. Ibid., sigs. (a1) v–(a2)r. 29. Ibid., p. 48. 30. Ibid., sigs. A5v–A6r. 31. John Locke, “Second Treatise of Government,” in Political Writings of John Locke, ed. David Wootton (New York, 1993), pp. 281–82. For Locke’s support of the Bank, see John Locke to Edward Clarke, June 30, 1694 and Locke to Clarke, August 6, 1694, in The Correspondence of John Locke and Edward Clarke, ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge, MA, 1927), pp. 395, 397. 32. H.T. Dickinson, chapter 1 in this book. 33. Keith Wrightson, “The Enclosure of English Social History,” in Rethinking Social History, ed. Adrian Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 59–77. 34. Wrightson, pp. 64–65. 35. Ibid., p. 65.

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36. Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, 2005). 37. Phil Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 2003) 38. This point has been made recently by P.J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires (Oxford, 2005), pp. 3–4. 39. I share this view with Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, p. 65.

Afterword

Representative Government: How Sure a Thing? Robert Zaller

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epresentative government appears to be so universally accepted a paradigm in the twenty-first century, at least ideologically, that its expositors tend to assume its historical inevitability. When Daniel Bell proclaimed the “end of ideology” in 1960, and Francis Fukuyama the “end of history” three decades later, they had in mind the seemingly irresistible march of popular legislative sovereignty, and, with only slightly less confidence, of the capitalist economies that appeared to accompany it.1 Free men exercising their rights through free institutions and free markets: such was the liberal creed, and such, too, was the apparent verdict of history. Even in a century of totalitarian fascism and communism, the liberal way had come through. The present volume, too, is in some degree a celebration of the liberal triumph, even if not all of us share the sense of festivity. Representative government in 1600 was the exception rather than the norm; in Europe, where alone it existed, only in the United Provinces and the Venetian Republic could it be said to be the sovereign entity, and even there what was represented was a commercial aristocracy rather than a broad-based citizen public. By 1800, Venice was no more, but a great new republic had emerged, and, even more importantly, a new and sweeping doctrine: popular sovereignty. Beyond that, the conservative French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville saw an even greater and more encompassing principle that he called democracy. Against this force, he believed, nothing could stand, and

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the next centuries were destined to see its development. As to whether it would prove a blessing, a curse, or, as in the ordinary run of human affairs, something in between, he reserved judgment.2 Jack Greene has given us an elegant account of how representative institutions grew in the uniquely favoring circumstances of the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the colonies of the Atlantic seaboard were in many cases chartered or patronized by noblemen, aristocracy as a whole did not cross the ocean. Rather, the colonists—at least those who came and worked voluntarily were freeborn Englishmen, self-selected for personal vigor and independence, anxious for fair opportunity, and determined to keep what they acquired as their own. If not exactly a Lockean community of individual cultivators, they found in abundance precisely what England had run out of: land for the taking, to be won by toil and secured by liberty. The ticket for the latter was self-government. As Professor Greene rightly notes, most males in early modern Europe— including Englishmen—were socioeconomically dependent, and even those idealized as “freeholders” by seventeenth-century pamphlet literature or as the “county community” by twentieth-century scholars3 were held fast within a hierarchy of authority, status, and property, and increasingly subject to the even more tyrannizing power of the market. These conditions held far more weakly in the New World, and the result, as Professor Greene aptly puts it, was “a deep and widespread process of individual and corporate self-empowerment.” This entailed not so much the creation of a new kind of society—that would come later—as the demand to enjoy the advantages of the colonists’ former betters in the society they had left behind. All these notions were summed up in the grand word “liberty.” That term implies, for us, an egalitarian condition, but for the New World colonists, it meant what they had back home, exemption and privilege. The most important of such privileges was representative institutions and the franchise on which they rested. It was this privilege that, more than any other, affirmed and constituted the rest. But it was based, as well, on the exercise of self-government on the local level, and, more broadly, the development of voluntary associations that Tocqueville noticed as distinctive to the American commonwealth. The ubiquity of representative institutions in the thirteen colonies and even in places as far afield as Jamaica and Barbados might suggest a general trend toward what Tocqueville predicted as a universal one a century or two later. But a more sober reading of the contemporary evidence would suggest rather that they were hothouse plants peculiar to the New World, and particularly to the English-speaking parts of it

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where a titular nobility had not (yet) established itself. As has Keith Brown pointed out, the roll call of popular assemblies fallen into desuetude in Europe had begun by the seventeenth century to sound very much like a death knell.4 The new bureaucratic monarchies of early modern Europe were largely able to dispense with them except for ceremonial purposes, and these were not sufficient to warrant their continuance—functionless bodies can only be anachronisms, and anachronisms can only invite exploitation by those with mischief in mind. As Knud Jespersen observes of Denmark, “In a society like this there was no need for representative institutions—only for controlling bodies to secure the maintenance of privileges.” Only a radical change of circumstance could revive popular assemblies, and such revivals were not necessarily permanent. In France, it would take 174 years for a crisis in state finances to resurrect the Estates-General, which itself lasted only six weeks in something like its ancient form; in Denmark, bankruptcy following military defeat led to an absolutist revolution that extinguished popular institutions until the mid-nineteenth century. If we consider such institutions in functionalist terms, they tended to gain a foothold—but generally a very precarious one—only in times of crisis, when the existing political order needed, at least temporarily, to expand its base. The exceptions to the rule, such as the Polish Sjem and the Hungarian Diet, can be explained by local circumstances: in the former case, a weak monarchy, and, in the latter, the desire to maintain autonomy within an imperial structure. Function, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Professor Brown notes the Duke of Lauderdale’s comment that England’s Parliament, of which, of course, he was a member, was “useless at the best”; and, sixty years earlier, James I had said much the same thing when he explained to the Spanish ambassador that it was an institution he had found on his accession and was obliged to put up with.5 It is safe to say, I think, that no English monarch of the seventeenth century would not gladly have dispensed with Parliament. Charles I actually attempted to do so, although, like Louis XIII of France, he did not need to make his intentions explicit, since parliament, like the Estates-General, convened only at the royal pleasure. It is worth focusing on the crisis of England’s representative body, because it was the last one in a major monarchy whose powers were waxing, at least from a royal perspective, in the early seventeenth century. Parliament had coestablished the national church in the sixteenth century, and its consent was grudgingly admitted for substantive changes in it thereafter—the brief return to Catholicism under Mary, the restoration of the Henrician order under Elizabeth, and

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the approval of formal doctrinal modification. The Crown had also granted members of the lower house the privilege of free speech in 1523, and although this was frequently more honored in the breach than in the observance, they took it very seriously, affirming it, finally, as the “right and due inheritance,” not only of themselves, but of the body politic itself.6 The House of Commons demanded the further extension of its privileges in the latter part of the sixteenth century, and the House of Lords did see a major expansion of its judicial functions of appeal and judgment after the revival of parliamentary impeachment in 1621. That same year saw the removal of the king’s Lord Chancellor by parliament, and his Lord Treasurer fell to the next one.7 Certainly, both James I and Charles I viewed parliament as challenging the royal prerogative, if not monarchy itself. Parliament’s own view—and that of some modern scholars—was far less sanguine. The House of Commons complained in 1604 that its rights and privileges had been infringed upon, and in 1625 a member observed that England’s parliament was the last of the representative bodies in Christendom that retained them.8 R.W.K. Hinton described the Stuart Parliament as a declining and dysfunctional institution in a seminal article in 1957, and a generation of revisionists, notably Sir Geoffrey Elton and Conrad Russell, picked up the theme. Sentimental traditionalists like Sir Francis Bacon tried to persuade their skeptical sovereign, James I, that there was some value in parliament; for his pains, Bacon was rewarded by impeachment, imprisonment, and disgrace in the very parliament he helped to secure.9 A neutral observer of England in the 1620s, if one could be imagined, might well have concluded that the Crown’s ability to promote its dynastic interests, and even to defend the country, was being compromised by the running disputes between king and parliament over taxation, religion, and the exercise of the royal prerogative. Given the track record of comparable representative bodies elsewhere, the likelihood of parliament prevailing in such a dispute would almost surely have been considered nil. When Charles I angrily sent parliament home in March 1629, the third such rupture within four years, it was reasonable to expect the worst. A probable scenario was that the king would make an example of the more obstreperous parliamentary leaders by fining and imprisoning them; impose extraparliamentary taxes and fight off legal challenges, should there be any, in the courts; and attempt to reconcile his subjects to a new order by ostentatious gestures of reform and displays of royal magnificence. All of this duly followed. Protest would be bootless, and armed resistance, in a country where the Crown enjoyed an effective monopoly of force, was


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impossible. Had Charles not made the mistake of being king of Scotland, England’s parliament might have joined its peers in the dustbin of history. Absolutism was to prove the wave of the future in Denmark; it might well have done so in England too. It is worth considering what might have happened had this been so. Popular assemblies flourished in the English colonies of the New World because circumstances favored them there, but they did so also because the colonists claimed them as the birthright of all Englishmen. If a parliament existed in England, then something comparable should exist in Virginia or South Carolina. Had parliament no longer existed as an active body, there would have been far less ideological pressure to create popular assemblies, and far more royal resistance to permitting them. Without a tradition of representative government, including self-taxation, the Stamp Act would hardly have caused the furor it did. Without an English parliament, whose future was in doubt as late as 1688, Locke would not have trumped Hobbes (or Filmer) in the Anglican constitutional tradition; Voltaire would have found little or less to admire in it; and the Continental Enlightenment might, minus the infusion of liberalism it received from him, have been a quite different phenomenon. The Age of Democratic Revolutions might never have been.10 Representative government might have been a failed medieval experiment, and modernization—had it come at all—might have taken another path, as Weber and Marx suggested it ultimately would. The French might have continued to incorporate the “rising” bourgeoisie into the existing status system, and the current Bourbon pretender might have been the latest king of France. All this is perfectly suppositional, of course; but, as a thought experiment, it shows us on what precarious foundations our actual world may rest, and how easy it may be to misinterpret the significance of representative government. That is particularly true in light of the contemporary times, when it seems to be losing effective power in direct proportion to its putative expansion around the globe, and even appears to have become, for recent American governments, a stalking horse for neoimperial domination. Of course, England’s parliament did prevail, and history took the course it did. But parliament itself was not necessarily a friend of representative government elsewhere. It really protected only itself. That is what it was doing when, in 1604, it rejected James I’s plan for an Anglo-Scottish Union. Such a Union, as critics on both sides of the border pointed out, might have meant an instantaneous dissolution of representative bodies, not to say all laws and institutions, in both countries. The English parliament had scant concern for what went on in

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Scotland, an attitude fully reciprocated in Edinburgh. The same was true of its attitude toward what passed for a parliament in Ireland.11 The effect of James’ accession to the English throne was, as Professor Brown points out, to augment his general power, and to reduce the Scottish parliament to complete subservience. If this raised any concern in the English parliament, or if that parliament took notice at all of the plight of its counterpart, there is no apparent evidence of it. Only with the Covenanting Parliaments of 1639 and 1640 did Scottish politics impinge on English consciousness as anything more than a nuisance. The rapprochement of the 1640s between revolutionary parliaments in both countries represented a temporary and highly exceptional convergence of interest. The Scots, for their part, had little choice but to accept the Glorious Revolution, which in effect reversed the circumstances of 1603 and gave an English-designated ruler control of the island. Union was then at the behest of England, and the act of an English parliament dissolved the Scottish one in 1707. A century later, the Irish parliament was similarly effaced.12 England’s parliament also threatened its American offspring in the 1760s and 1770s, suppressing its functions and authorizing the imposition of martial law.13 The Continental Congress was a revolutionary assembly, and what it defied was not only its royal sire but its parliamentary dam. If the English parliament were to be considered the mother of modern representative government, it was not for lack of successful fratricide and attempted infanticide. The Grimm Brothers might best have recognized such a parent. Representative government could, of course, prove very successful. It mobilized English resources in the late sixteenth century to successfully resist the powerful Spanish monarchy, as the riksdag did in Sweden in the seventeenth to bring its country to great power status. It deftly facilitated the transition of elites from an agrarian aristocracy to an industrial capitalist class. The two great empires of modern times, the British and the American, were built on it. Its ideological triumph has, of course, been even greater. Even modern dictators have been obliged to pay lip service to the idea that they rule with the consent of, if not at the behest of, popular assemblies. From this perspective, a history of representative government in modern times might well be called “My Brilliant Career.” As the contributions to this volume indicate, however, popular assemblies have succeeded by their very adaptability to changing elite structures and interests, not to say commands. Merely to note the omnipresence of representative institutions in contemporary society, therefore, tells us little about their actual function or authority. They are, in fact, declining


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everywhere in the so-called family of democratic nations. There are many reasons for this, but the concentration of executive authority in the modern state is the most obvious one.14 Redesigning the executive function in the post–absolutist period was the most pressing task of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century constitutionalism. The Founding Fathers in America could take their legislative and judicial systems from the English model as well as from the practice of the thirteen states, but the office of the presidency was de novo. In freeing themselves from what they regarded as monarchical tyranny, they wanted to ensure that the presidency was elective, and possessed no more of unfettered prerogative than was necessary to constitute and protect a federal state. Cabinet members and justices were to be officers of state, chosen with the advice and consent of the Senate. The executive was to have no source of revenue but that provided by the legislature, to which he was annually obliged to report his discharge of office. Though the president conducted wars, only Congress could authorize and fund them. The individual states remained sovereign for most purposes other than those—coinage, defense, foreign policy, the provision of justice—that required joint action or common standards. The formal mechanisms set in place by the Founding Fathers continue to function for the most part, with the notable exception of the war-making prerogative, but, despite the heroic restraints placed on the presidency, the past two centuries have been characterized by its steady and seemingly irresistible growth. Congress has been the loser. French constitutional experiments at legislative sovereignty and a controlled executive have been even less successful. Within a decade, Louis XVI had been replaced by Napoleon, while legislatures had come and gone with the speed of the Cheshire cat. In England, parliamentary sovereignty devolved upon the office of prime minister, a presidency in all but name.15 The catastrophic failures of the Weimar-era Reichstag in Germany and of the post–Soviet Duma in Russia have shown the risks of decompressing from authoritarian regimes. Tocqueville had believed that the presidency, with its limited and conditional authority in a federal system of states and a broadly democratic culture, would remain a weak institution. The vast accretion of military and bureaucratic power in the modern executive of the world’s most powerful nation has, however, conferred quasi-absolutist powers on it, and proportionally reduced the role of Congress. A reader of seventeenth-century parliamentary debates, such as those that produced the Petition of Right in the Parliament of 1628, is particularly struck by the contrast between the sharp-sighted, tenacious, and legally sophisticated defense of personal liberties and property

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rights they display, and the passive, not to say supine response to egregious executive violations of law and trust exhibited by their contemporary successors in Britain and America. To turn from the labors of Sir Edward Coke and his colleagues who assured the subject his day in court to an American Congress passing legislation to deny executive detainees a legal hearing, or a British House of Commons putting the crime of “glorifying” terrorism on the ancient statute books of the realm, is not to come away with the sense that the representatives of modern democracy have a necessarily better-informed sense of citizen rights and protections than those of an Old Regime monarchy. Tocqueville, the anxious spokesman of aristocratic tradition confronting the brave new world of nineteenth-century democracy, wondered whether in delivering Europe and America from ancient forms of tyranny, it might not be preparing more virulent ones. The problem of representative institutions—or of any other kind— returns us, of course, to the realities of the social and economic power they express, no less than to the concentration of bureaucratic authority in the modern executive. No peasant and no workman sat in the French Revolutionary Assembly, though these classes comprised nine-tenths of the population; none sits in Britain’s Parliament, despite the fact that it is governed by a group that is pleased to call itself the “Labour” Party; none sits in the American Congress, whose members spend most of their time seeking and servicing corporate sponsors. Obviously, representative government is not a panacea for all ills, or a guarantee of democracy. Still, it seems a point worth making at a time when democracy is universally retreating just as representative institutions are advancing, or at any rate proliferating. Conrad Russell, borrowing a phrase from a Caroline MP, called his book about the course of representative government in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries The Crisis of Parliaments.16 Perhaps we should apply the same phrase to our own era.

Notes 1. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL, 1962); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992). 2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, tr. Arthur Goldhammer, 2 vols. in 1 (Library of America, 2004 [1835, 1840]). 3. For a summary and critique of the “County Community” debate, begun by Alan Everitt in the 1960s, see Clive Holmes, “The County Community in Stuart Historiography,” Journal of British Studies 19, 2 (1980): 54–73.


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4. Keith M. Brown, “Politics, Representation, and the Estates in Early Modern Scotland,” a paper presented to the conference on Parliaments, Peoples, and Power 1603–1800, Yale University, April 7–9, 2005. 5. David Harris Willson, King James VI and I (New York, 1967), p. 348. 6. On the evolution of the concept of free speech in Parliament, see J.E. Neale, “The Commons’ Privilege of Free Speech in Parliament,” in Tudor Studies Presented . . . to Albert Frederick Pollard, ed. R.W. Seton-Watson (London: Longmans Green, 1924), pp. 257–86, for its affirmation as a “right and due inheritance,” see the “Form of Apology and Satisfaction,” drafted in the House of Commons in 1604, in Constitutional Documents of the Reign of James I, ed. J.R. Tanner (Cambridge, UK, 1961), pp. 217–30, at 221. See also David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, UK, 2005), especially chapter 3. 7. Robert Zaller, The Parliament of 1621: A Study in Constitutional Conflict (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), chapter 2; Robert E. Ruigh, The Parliament of 1624: Politics and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 316ff.; Colin G.C. Tite, Impeachment and Parliamentary Judicature in Early Modern England (London, 1974). 8. S.R. Gardiner, ed., Debates in the House of Commons in 1625, Camden Society, n.s., vol. 8 (London, 1873), p. 110. 9. R.W.K. Hinton, “The Decline of Parliamentary Government under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts,” Cambridge Historical Journal 13, 2 (1957), pp. 116–32; G.R. Elton, “A High Road to Civil War?” in Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics: Papers and Reviews, 1946–1972, ed. Elton, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK, 1974), p. 2, 19–61; idem., The Parliament of England, 1559–1581 (Cambridge, UK, 1986); Conrad Russell, “Parliamentary History in Perspective,” History 61, 1 (1976), pp. 1–27; idem., Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979); see also Kevin Sharpe, “Parliamentary History 1603–1629: In or Out of Perspective?” in Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History, ed. Sharpe (Oxford, 1978), pp. 1–42. 10. The phrase is R.R. Palmer’s, from his The Age of the Democratic Revolutions, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1959, 1964). 11. The debates on James I’s proposed union of Scotland and Ireland in the parliament of 1604–1610 make clear the horror with which English MPs regarded any admixture of the customs and cultures, including parliamentary ones, of the two nations. A more fundamental concern, expressed by MPs such as Sir Edwin Sandys, was that union would automatically abolish the legal systems on both sides of the border. 12. On the extinction of both parliaments, see, for Scotland, P.W.J. Riley, The Union of England and Scotland (Manchester, 1978), Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State (Oxford, 1987), and Maurice J. Lee, Jr., The Inevitable Union and Other Essays on Early Modern Scotland (East Linton, 2003); for Ireland, Patrick M. Geoghan,

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13.

14.

15.

16.

Robert Zaller The Irish Act of Union (Dublin, 1999); Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan, eds., Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts and Consequences of the Acts of Union (Dublin, 2001); and Michael Brown, Patrick M. Geoghegan, and James Kelly, eds., The Irish Act of Union, 1800: Bicentennial Essays (Dublin, 2003). Modern scholars have found little to lament in the demise of the factional Scottish assembly, but the Irish parliament, invigorated by the emancipation of the Thirteen Colonies, had been a far more promising enterprise. Most notably in the Coercive Acts (1774), especially the Massachusetts Government Act. A revisionist view is suggested in Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendricksen, The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the American War of Independence (Baltimore and London, 1982), which characterizes the Coercive Acts as “quite moderate” in view of the revolutionary claim advanced by the American Continental Congress that the colonies owed no obedience to the British parliament, but only to the Crown. George III, indeed, called the rebellion of the colonies “a battle for the legislature” (cited in Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the Wars of American Independence [Oxford, 2000]). See the suggestive comments in John Lukacs, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (New Haven, 2005); cf. Andrew Rudalevige, The New Imperial Presidency: Renewing Presidential Power after Watergate (Ann Arbor, 2005), for a case study in the supersession of legislative authority. See Michael Foley, The Rise of the British Presidency (Manchester, 1993); G.P. Thomas, Prime Minister and Cabinet Today (Manchester, 1998). The development of prime ministerial authority is reviewed in June Burnham and G. Jones, eds., “The Evolving Prime Minister’s Office: 1868–1997,” in Transforming British Government: Changing Institutions, ed. R.A.W. Rhodes (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, UK, 2000). The preceding “era” of parliamentary sovereignty is reviewed in Jeffrey Goldsworthy, The Sovereignty of Parliament: History and Philosophy (Oxford, 1999). Some commentators see power in the modern British state as diffused in the executive bureaucracy rather than concentrated in the prime minister’s office; for a summary of the debate, see Philip Norton, The British Polity, 4th ed. (New York, 2001), chapter 8. Conrad Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments (London and New York, 1971).

Index

absolutism, 2–4, 175, 219 Denmark and, 11, 135, 139–41, 145, 146n2, 217, 219 England and, 5 France and, 75, 77, 80–3, 89 Germany and, 9, 10, 94–5, 104–5 Spain and, 1203, 149, 153 Sweden and, 141–2 Absolutist Revolution, 135, 139–40, 145, 146n2, 217 Acadians, 187–9 accountability, 2, 3, 6–7, 45–62, 204 financial vs. political, 6–7, 48, 54–5 modern idea of, 45–6 Act of Continuation (1641), 5 Act of Explanation (1665), 117 Acts of Settlement (1652, 1662, 1665), 117–18 Adams, Julia, 212 Adhémar, Jean-Baptiste, 194, 195 administrative efficiency, 144 Adventurer’s Act (1642), 118 Age of Absolutism, 75 Age of Democratic Revolutions, 219 aldermen, 152, 158–9, 164 Alfred the Great, King of England, 199 American colonies, 4, 13–16, 115, 191, 171–86, 125n12, 216, 220–2, 224n13 American Continental Congress, 220, 224n13 American Revolution, 6, 14, 15, 32, 35, 180–1, 192–4, 196, 220–1 Ancient Constitutions, 123

Anderson, Benedict, 206 Anglo-Irish Union (1800–1), 116, 127n24, 198, 220 Anglo-Scottish Union of, 1707, 209, 220 plan of, 1604, 219, 223n11 Anne, Queen of England, 53 Antigua, 177 Antrim, earls of, 118 Appel de la Justice de l’Etat (Calvet), 193 Arcand, Denis, 198 Aristotle, 4 armies, 87–9, 144, 203–4 Articles of Capitulation (1760), 15, 188–9, 196 Asch, Ronald G., 9, 93–111 assemblies, popular British colonies and, 177–83, 189, 219–20 decline of, in 17th century, 217–19 modern, 220–1 pyramid of, 82 see also specific assemblies Aufschwörung, 101 Australia, 171 Austria, 85, 89 Bacon, Nathaniel, 175 Bacon, Sir Fancis, 49, 218 Baden-Durlach, 9 Baecque, Antoine de, 86 Bahamas, 14, 174, 180 Baker, Keith Michael, 76 Ball, William, 208 Baltic Sea, 136, 145, 204

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Index

Baltimore, Lord, 53–4 Bamberg, 99 Barbados, 177, 178, 216 Bartlett, Tom, 115 Belgium, 88 Bell, Daniel, 215 Bell, David A., 3, 7–8, 75–92, 207–8 Bell, Philip, 178 Belsham, William, 35 Berkeley, Sir William, 178 Bermuda, 14, 174, 177 Bertaud, Jean-Paul, 88 Bibra, Philip Anton von, 96–7 Birmingham, 28 Blackett, Sir Edward, 66 Blackstone, William, 24, 31 Bohemia, 96 Boix, Carles, 204–5 boroughs, 3 British Parliament and, 63–72 Irish Parliament and, 119 Boswell, James, 6–7, 63–72 bourgeoisie, 27, 103, 106, 219; see also commercial interests; merchant class Boyles of Cork, 118 Braddick, Mike, 204 Bradshaw, Brendan, 115, 117 Brady, Ciaran, 115, 129n43 Brandenburg, 9, 94, 99 Breves, papal, 160–1 Brewer, John, 46 Bristol, 28, 33 Britain (England), 2–7, 77, 84–5, 205, 207–11 accountability and, 45–62 boroughmongering and, 20–1, 27–8, 34, 63–73 American and Caribbean colonies and, 11, 13–14, 171–86 civil wars of 1640s, 5, 14, 50–1, 55, 57, 114, 117, 121–3, 179 constitution of, 30, 31 emergence of strong state in, 204 18th century system in, 19–44

Ireland and, 4, 10–11, 114–15, 117–18, 122 French-speaking Catholic Canada and, 14–15, 187–201 Scotland and, 4 Rousseau critique of, 83 British Admiralty Board, 52–3 British Council of War, 49 British Court of Wards, 51 British Empire, 115, 183, 197–9, 220 British Exchequer or Treasury, 6, 48–50, 52, 54–6 British House of Commons, 3, 5–6, 9, 19–23, 25–38, 46–7, 49–52, 54, 56–7, 63–73, 95, 177–8, 181–2, 218, 222 British House of Lords, 5–6, 25, 38, 48, 64, 218 British Navy, 52–6, 61n26 British Ordnance Office, 54, 56 British Parliament, 5–7, 46, 48, 63–73, 83, 175, 207, 217–22, 224n13 Cavalier, 51 Convention, 50–2 Covenanting, of 1639 and 1640, 220 Ireland and, 114, 117–18, 122 Long, 5, 50, 55 post-Civil war, 52–9 pre-Civil war, 47–50 Rump, 50 triennial of 1694–1715, 54 British Privy Council, 190 British Treasury, 46, 49, 50, 54 Brooke, John, 66, 73n9 Brooks, Colin, 57 Brown, Keith M., 206, 217, 220, 223n4 Brunet, Michel, 198 Burgh, James, 35–6, 38 Burke, Edmund, 5, 24, 27–8, 30–1, 33, 57, 70–1, 172, 207–8 Bute, Earl of, 65, 68 Butlers of Ormond, 118

Index Cabinet, The, 37 California, 88 Calvet, Pierre du, 192–3 Calvin, Jean, 78 Canada, 2, 4, 14–16, 171, 187–201, 209 Canadian Court of Common Pleas, 190 Canadian Court of Queen’s Bench, 190 Canadian executive council, 195 Care, Henry, 175 Caribbean, 3, 13 Carleton, Sir Guy, Baron Dorchester, 191–2, 194–6 Carlingford, Earl of, 118 Carlisle, 66–7, 73nn Cartwright, John, 5–6, 35–8 Case of Ireland (Molyneux), 113 Case of Pierre Du Calvet, The (Calvet), 193 Castile, 12–13, 149–69 Castlehaven, Earl of, 10, 113–14 Catalonian rebellion, 123 cathedral chapters, 99–104, 108n22 Catholicism, 105–6 Catholics British rule in Canada and, 11, 14–15, 187–90, 192, 195–8 England and, 121–3, 217 France and, 76, 78, 81 Germany and, 94, 97, 99, 103 Ireland and, 10–11, 114, 116, 118–23 Chamber of the City of London, 50, 56 Championnet, General, 88 Chandaman, C.D., 61n15 Charlemagne, 89 Charles I, King of England, 5, 49, 116–18, 120, 123, 217–19 Charles II, King of England, 5, 50–1, 117 Charles II, King of Spain, 13 Charles V, King of Spain, 149, 153–5

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charters, 172, 177, 216 Chichester, Lord Deputy, 119 China, 212 Churchill, Charles, 68 Church of England, 15, 189, 197, 217 cities and towns, 2, 3, 205–6 England and, 28, 34 Germany and, 103–4 Spain and, 12, 13, 151–6, 158–64, 167–8n35 citizens, active vs. proprietary, 37 city councils, 4, 12, 152, 162 Clancarthy, Earl of, 118 Clanricard, Earl of, 118 Clarendon, Earl of, 51–2, 55, 59 Clarges, Sir Thomas, 56, 57 Clarke, Aidan, 115, 118 clergy, 2 Denmark and, 135 Spain and, 12, 153–6, 160–1 Cleves and Mark diet, 9 Cockermouth, 65, 73n9 Coercive Acts (1774), 224n13 Coke, Sir Edward, 47, 49, 175, 222 Cologne, 99–100, 104 colonial councilors, 176 colonial governors, 176, 179, 189 colonial governor’s council, 178–9, 189, 191, 194 Comité Canadien, 194 Commentaries on the Laws of England (Blackstone), 24 commercial interests, 28, 215 Commission of Accounts (1644, 1667, 1691–7, 1780–7), 46, 50–6, 58–9, 61nn Committee of Public Safety, 86, 87 common law, 175 Comuneros revolt (1521), 149 Condorcet, 209 Connecticut, 177, 180 Connolly, Sean, 115 conscription, 87–8, 144 Constitutional Act (1791), 15, 195–9

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Index

constitutions and constitutionalism, 2, 3, 5–6, 19, 23, 25, 114, 116–17, 121, 123, 137, 140, 142, 144, 146n3, 179; see also specific national constitutions Cook, Ramsay, 13, 14–15, 187–201, 209 Cooper, Thomas, 37 Cordova, Bishop of, 161 coronation, 78–9, 89, 137, 140, 175 corpus mysticum, 76–8, 82–3 Corti ecclesiastiche , 155 Council of Castile, 155, 159 “country persuasion”, 57–9 county community, 216, 222n3 county councils, 122 county franchises, 124n5 Cregan, Donal, 115 Crisis of Parliaments, The (Russell), 222 Cromwell, Oliver, 5, 122 Crugar, Henry, 33 Cumberland, 66, 73n7

Denmark-Norway, 4, 11, 103, 133–41, 143–5, 204–5, 211, 217 revolution of 1848, 141 diarchy, 137, 140–1 Dickinson, H.T., 5–6, 19–44, 71, 207, 210–11 Dickson, P.G.M., 62 Dilly brothers, 69–72 “Discourse on Political Economy” (Rousseau), 208 diversity-of-interests model, 209–11 Dominica, 181 Dominion of New England, 179, 209 Dorchester, Lord, see Carleton, Sir Guy Douglass, Dr. William, 180–1 Downing, Sir George, 56 “Dundas Despotism,” 63 Dundas Despotism, The (Fry), 72n1 Durham, Lord, Report of 1839, 197 Dyson, Jeremiah, 30

Danby, 55 Danish Assembly of Estates, 11, 139–40 Danish Lansting, 11, 137 Danish Law, The (1683), 140–1 Danish state council, 11, 137, 139–40, 144 Danvila, Manuel, 168 Dargo, George, 176 Davies, Sir John, 119, 125n12, 175 Déclin de l’Empire Américan, Le (film), 198 Defoe, Daniel, 208 De Laudibus Legum Angliae (Fortescue), 174 Delisle, Jean, 194 democracy, 23–4, 30–1, 34–8, 86, 204–6, 209, 215–16, 219–22 direct, 8, 23–5, 83, 85–6, 88 Dempster, George, 182

East India Company, 57, 69 East Indies, 204 Eaton, Daniel Isaac, 36 economic systems Denmark and, 138–9 development and, 204–6 English reform movement and, 59 Sweden and, 143–4 Edinburgh Enlightenment, 72 Egremont, Earl of, 189 elections (voting, franchise), 2, 205, 216 colonies and, 182, 216 Denmark and, 137, 140–1 England and, 6–7, 20–38, 65–72 France and, 82, 85, 87 German principalities and, 97–8, 101 Ireland and, 11 property and, 211

Index Quebec and, 15 Scotland and, 20, 63 Spain and, 151 universal suffrage and, 35–7, 85 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 217 Ellis, Steven, 115 Elton, Sir Geoffrey, 218 empires, 183 Enlightenment, 2, 3, 8, 77, 83, 219 equality, 34, 38 Escobar, Jesús, 16n3 Estates Denmark and, 137–9, 144 Germany and, 93–8, 100–2, 104–6 Spain and, 150–1, 153–4, 156, 160 Sweden and, 141, 143 see also French Estates General Everard, Sir John, 119 executive, 77, 221–2, 224n15 Fall of the First British Empire, The (Tucker and Hendricksen), 224n13 “Family-State Compact,” 80 federalism, 209, 221 Federalist papers, 3 Ferdinand and Isabella, King and Queen of Spain, 149 feudal hierarchies, 2–3 Filmer, Sir Robert, 47, 219 financial accountability, 6 62n47 England and, 46–59 France and, 81 Spain and, 150–64 see also taxation Florida, 181 Foley, Paul, 55 Fortea Pérez, José Ignacio, 12–13, 149–69, 205 Fortescue, Sir John, 174–5 Foucault, Michel, 204 Fox, Charles James, 196 France, 4, 7–8, 46, 51–2, 62n47, 75–92, 101–2, 123, 135, 175,

229

187, 205, 207–8, 211, 217, 219, 221 coup of 18th Brumaire, 88–9 Republic of 1792, 85–6, 88 wars of religion, 79–80 see also New France Franconia, 99–100, 102 Frank, Peter Anton, 105 Frankish assemblies, 78, 80–1 Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, 8 Frederick II, King of Prussia, 96 Freeholders’ Grand Inquest (Filmer), 47 free speech, 218 French Canadians, 4, 13–15, 188, 190–2, 195–9 French constitutions (1791), 84–5 (1793), 85, 59, 60n1 (1795), 87 (1799), 88–9 French Consulate, 75 French Directory, 87–8 French Estates General, 4, 7–8, 75, 78–9, 81–5, 207, 217 French National Assembly, 8, 84–5, 222 French National Convention, 8, 85–7 French parlements, 8, 78–81, 83–4, 89, 123 Parlement of Paris, 79–81, 84 French Provincial Assemblies, 82–4 French Revolution, 6, 8, 35, 75, 77, 82, 85–7, 89–90, 105–6, 222 French Tribunate, 89 Friedeburg, Robert V., 94 Friedland, Paul, 76, 79, 81, 86–7, 90n2 Fronde, 81, 123 Fry, Michael, 72n1 Fukuyama, Francis, 215 Furet, François, 75–6, 87, 89

230

Index

Galicia, 151 Garforth, John Baynes, 67, 73n9 Garneau, François-Xavier, 198 Garroway, William, 56 general will, 83, 208–10 George II, King of England, 71 George III, King of England, 97, 224n13 Georgia, 180, 181 German councils, 8–9 German diets, 8–9, 93–5, 101–3 ecclesiastical, 9–10, 96–8, 100–2, 104–6 German imperial law courts, 97 Aulic Council (Vienna), 94, 101, 103 Chamber Court (Wetzlar), 101–2 German Landtags (territorial diets), 9, 100, 102, 105 German Reichsritter, 99, 102 German Reichstag, 8–9, 221 German Ritterschaft (noble estate), 99–100, 102–3, 106 Germany, 2, 4, 8–10, 89, 93–106, 133 constitutions, 105 Weimar, 221 Giesey, Ralph, 76 Gladstone, William, 5 Glorious Revolution (1688), 5, 14, 52, 180–1, 220 Godolphin administration, 53 Gorski, Phil, 212 Grand Concernments of England, 208 Great Northern War, 136 Greeks, 4, 8 Greene, Jack P., 13–14, 171–86, 204, 209, 216 Grenada, 15, 181, 189–90, 193, 198 Grenville, William, 15, 195–6 Guadeloupe, 188 Habsburgs, 12, 94, 135, 149, 153–69

Haldimand, Sir Frederick, 192–4 Hanley, Sarah, 76, 80 Harley, Robert, 55, 57–8 Haro, Don Luis de, 160 Haslemere borough, 66, 73n9 Hastings, Warren, 69 Hayton, David, 115–16 Hearth Tax (England), 51 Hendricksen, David C., 224n13 Henri II, King of France, 78 Henri IV, King of France, 79 Henry VIII, King of England, 129 Hercules-Hydra iconography, 86–7 Hildesheim, 99–100, 104–5 Hindle, Steve, 204 Hinton, R.W.K., 218 Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 219 Hohenzollerns, 9, 94 Holstein diet, 9 Holy Roman Empire, 93–111 Hotman, François, 78 Howard, Charles, Earl of Surrey, later Duke of Norfolk, 64–5, 73n5 Howard, Sir Robert, 56 Hudson’s Bay colony, 181 Hulme, Obadiah, 35 Hume, David, 207 Hungarian Diet, 217 Hunt, Lynnn, 86 impeachment, 48, 114, 218 imperialism, 172–3 Independents, 50, 58 India, 209, 212 Ireland, 2, 4, 8, 10–11, 52, 113–32, 206–7, 210, 223n11 Irish army, 52 Irish Confederate General Assemblies, 10, 114–15, 121–3, 131n63 Irish House of Commons, 113–16, 119, 121–2, 125n9 Irish House of Lords, 114–15, 120, 122

Index Irish Parliament, 4, 10–11, 113–32, 198, 206–7, 220, 224n12, 125–5n8 Patriot, 117, 207 Restoration, 117 Irish Supreme Council, 121–2, 131n63 Italy, 88, 98, 123 Jacobins, 86–7, 90 Jamaica, 179, 216 James I, King of England (VI of Scotland), 5, 49, 116, 119, 123, 217–20, 223n11 James II, King of England, 51, 117, 179, 209 Jansenism, 81 Jansson, Maija, 1–17 Jebb, John, 36 Jespersen, Knud J.V., 11, 133–47, 204–5, 211–12, 217 Jespersen, Leon, 146n2 Johnson, Samuel, 6, 63, 66, 68–72 Johnston, Edith Mary, 115 Journal für Deutschland, 96 Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (Boswell), 66 juries, 175 Kalmar Union, 136 Kammen, Michael, 177 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 76 Kearney, Hugh, 8, 115, 123 Kelly, James, 115 Kelly, Patrick, 115 Kingship Act (1541), 10, 117–18 Knubley, Edward, 66, 73n7 Labour Party, British, 222 Laflèche, Msgr., 199 Landed Qualification Act (1711), 6, 27 land ownership, 2, 26–7, 123, 143, 209–11; see also property Lauderdale, Duke of, 217

231

law English colonists and, 174–80 French Canada and, 15, 188–92, 195–7 natural, 160 rule of, 23, 174–5, 180 Lawson, Phillip, 189 Lee, Arthur, 72 Leeds, 28 legislative power, 2, 6, 89, 117, 122, 28n36, 182, 195, 221 Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor, 9 Le Paige, Louis-Adrien, 81–2 Lerner, Daniel, 205–6 Letters on the Lit de Justice (Le Paige), 81 Letter to the People of Scotland (Boswell), 66 levée en mass (1793), 87 liberal delegation concept, 7, 76–7, 81–4, 86–8 liberalism, 83, 85, 215, 219 liberty, 81, 175–6, 216, 221–2; see also rights Liège, 105 Life of Johnson, The (Boswell), 67–9, 71–2, 73n10 Limongi, Fernando, 204 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 204–5, 209 lit de justice, 79, 81 literacy, 35, 206 Liverpool, 28 Lives of the Poets (Johnson), 71 Locke, John, 5, 31, 32, 34–5, 208, 210–11, 213n31, 216, 219 Loi Jourdan (1798), 87 London, 28, 33–4 London Journal 1762–1763 (Boswell), 68 Longley, John, 37 Lords of Trade report of 1763, 189 Louisburg, 187 Louis XIII, King of France, 79, 217 Louis XIV, King of France, 8, 79 Louis XV, King of France, 81

232

Index

Louis XVI, King of France, 84–5, 221 Lower Canada, 15, 195–7, 209 Lower Canadian Assembly, 195–7 Lowther, James, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, 6–7, 63–71, 73nn Lowther, Robert, 65 Loyalists, 193–5 Lugo, Bishop of, 161 Lutheran Church, 78, 94, 135, 146n2 Mackintosh, James, 36 Madison, James, 3 Magennis, Eoin, 115 Magna Charta, 180 Mainz, 99–100, 104–5, 110n42 Malaga, Bishop of, 161 Malcomson, Anthony, 115 Man, Yunlong, 176, 178 Manchester, 28 mandat impératif, 84 Mansfield, Lord, 190 manufacturing, 27–8, 210–11 Mariana of Austria, Spanish regent, 13, 163 Márquez, Father, 158 Marshall, P.J., 188 Marx, Karl, 219 Mary I, Queen of England, 217 Maryland, 177–8 Massachusetts, 177–80, 192 Massachusetts Government Act (1774), 224n13 Maza, Sarah, 76, 78 McGrath, Bríd, 115 McGrath, Ivar, 115 Mecklenburg, 9, 94, 103 media growth, 206 medieval universalism, 135 Memorandum on the Municipalities (Turgot), 82, 89 merchant classes, 2, 27, 190–4 Meres, Sir Thomas, 56 metaphorical embodiment, 76–80, 82, 85–7, 89 Middle East, 206

Middlesex, 34, 69 millones subsidies, 155–6, 159–60, 162 Minden, 99 Mirabeau, 84 mixed government, 179 modernization, 203–6, 219 “Modernization: Theories and Facts” (Przeworski and Limongi), 204 Moltke, von, 103 Molyneux, William, 113–14, 123, 125n12 monarchia mixta, 11–12, 141–3 monarchy abolition of, 38, 85 bureaucratic, 217 diarchy, or elective, 137, 140–1 dissolution of bodies by, 2–3 expansion of, 8 as metaphorical head of corpus mysticum, 77–9 regal vs. political, 175 see also specific monarchs Monk, James, 197 Montesquieu, 182 Montserrat, 177 Moody, T.W., 115–16, 125n13 Moore, Barrington, 204 Mornet, Daniel, 83 Morrice, Sir William, 48 Moser, Friedrich Carl von, 97–8 Mountmorres, Lord, 124n8 Münster, 100, 102–4 Murray, James, 188–91 Namier, Sir Lewis, 73n9 Naples, 123 Napoleon Bonaparte, 75, 87–9, 221 national interest, 206, 209–10 national sentiment model, 209–11 nation army and, 87–8 definition of, 209 embodied in King and Estates, 83 see also state

Index native Irish, 114, 119 Navigation Acts (1651–96), 179 Neatby, Hilda, 192 Necker, Jacques, 62n47, 82–4, 208–9 Netherlands, 6, 46, 51, 173, 175, 179, 205, 210–11, 215 Nevis, 177 Newcastle, 28 New England, 3, 189–90 New English, 114, 120 Newfoundland, 181 New France, 3–4, 13–15, 187–201 New Hampshire, 179, 180 New Haven, 177 New Jersey, 179–80 New World, 172–4, 216–17, 219 New York, 179 New Zealand, 171 nobility, 208, 220 Denmark and, 135, 137–40, 143, 146n2 England and, 25, 38 France and, 85, 101–2, 106 Germany and, 95–106 New World and, 216–17 Spain and, 12, 153–4, 156 Sweden and, 135, 141, 143 noble corporations, 9–10, 95–6, 98, 100–3, 105 nobless de la robe vs. de l’épée, 80, 123 Norfolk, Duke of, see Howard, Charles, Earl of Surrey North, Douglass C., 205 North, Lord, 27, 28 North Briton No. 45 controversy, 68–9 Norwich, 28 Nottingham, 28 Nova Scotia, 180–1, 189 Nueva Recopilación, 156 Ohlmeyer, Jane, 8, 10, 113–32, 206, 209

233

Old English, 114–16, 118–23, 130n50 Olivares, 159–61 Osma, Bishop of, 161 Osnabrück bishopric, 99, 100, 102–4 Oswald, John, 38 Paderborn, 100–1 Paine, Thomas, 36, 38 Paoli, 66 Paris Sections, 85–6 Parker, Geoffrey, 123 Parliaments, Peoples, and Powers (Yale University, 2005), 16 party politics, 58–9 patronage, 105, 115, 118 Peace of Paris (1763), 68, 188 peasants and farmers, 2, 11, 105, 35, 138, 141, 143–5, 222 Pennington, Katherine, 65 Pennington, Sir Joseph, 65 Pennsylvania, 179 Perceval-Maxwell, Michael, 115 peripheries, central authority and, 183–4 periphery states, 133–4 Peru, 173 Petition of Right, 221 Petty, William, 125n12 Phelips, Sir Roberts, 49 Philip II, King of Spain, 155 Philip III, King of Spain, 162 Philip IV, King of Spain, 13, 123, 155, 157, 159, 163–4, 168, 207 Phillips, George, 37 Pincus, Steven, 16, 203–14 Piskorski, Vladimir, 149 Pitt, William, 65, 196–7, 198 Place and Pension Bills, 71 plebiscites, 88–9 Plymouth colony, 177, 180 Poland, 89, 94 Polish Sjem, 217 Politics (Aristotle), 4

234

Index

politiques party, French, 79–80 poor, 24–5, 35; see also peasants and farmers; workers Portugal, 123, 172–3 Pownall, Thomas, 182 Poynings’ Law (1494), 10, 117 Presbyterians, 50, 55, 57–8 presidency, 221 Price, Richard, 32, 35–6, 38, 54, 183 Priestley, Joseph, 35–6 prime minister, 221, 224n15 “print capitalism,” 206 Proclamation of 1763, 188–9, 191 proctors, 12–13, 151–2, 156, 158–9, 163–4 property, 216 franchise and, 2, 5–6, 20–8, 31, 34–5, 87, 211 land- vs. labor-based view of, 209–11 qualification for MPs, 21, 26–7 rights, 176, 221–2 Protestants, 81, 10, 97, 99, 114, 118–22, 174, 187–8, 131n69 provincial councils or assemblies, 122 provincializing of political history, 211–12 provincial rebellions, 160 proxies, 120, 151–2 Prussia, 9, 71, 85, 94, 96, 100 Prynne, William, 50, 55, 58 Przeworski, Adam, 204 Pulteney, William, 33, 53, 58 Quebec, 15, 181, 189–99 division of, 195–7, 209 elected Assembly and, 189–95 Quebec Act (1774), 15, 192–5 Quebec Governor’s Council, 15 Quelques considérations sur Rapports de La Sociéte Civile, Les (Laflèche), 199 radicals, 32–8, 71–2, 85, 208

Reform Act (1832), 7 Reformation, 8, 78, 99, 135 reform movements, 59, 105–6, 120–1, 139, 144–5 representation active vs. passive, 7, 76–7, 80–2, 89 defined, 3–4, 16n2 metaphorical embodiment vs. liberal delegation, 76–7 nationalist theories of, 207 Restoration, 10, 50–1, 54, 61n15, 121, 179 Reynell, Carew, 210 Rhineland, 88 Rhode Island, 177 Richelieu, 123 Richmond, Duke of, 56–7 rights French Canadian, 192 “of Englishmen,” and colonies, 173–81, 194, 209, 216, 219 natural, 35–6 see also property rights Robespierre, Maximilien, 86, 87 Roman empire, 4 Roseveare, Henry, 62 Rothschild, Emma, 209 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 8, 83–4, 88, 208 Roux, Jacques, 86 Rumbold, Sir Thomas, 69 Russell, Conrad, 218, 222 Russia, 89 Russian Duma, 221 Sachetti, Monsignor, 159 St. Kitts, 177 St John, Henry, Viscount Bolingbroke, 58 St. John (Caribbean), 181 St. Vincent, 181 Salisbury, Earl of, 49 Sandys, Sir Edwin, 223n11 Satterthwaite, James C., 67, 73n9

Index Saxony, 94, 96 Scandinavia, 11–12, 133–47 Scotland, 4, 20, 49, 63, 123, 114, 210, 219–20, 223n11 Scottish Court of Session, 64 Scottish Parliament, 4, 206–7, 220, 224n12 Seaward, Paul, 6, 45–62, 204, 211 Second Treatise on Government (Locke), 31–2, 34 Segovia, Bishop of, 161 Self-Denying Ordinance, 50 self-government, 182–3, 216 Selwyn, George, 64 Seven Years’ War, French-English, 3, 4, 14, 68 181, 187–8 Seven Years’ War, Nordic, 136 Seville, Archbishop of, 161 Sheffield, 28 Shippen, William, 58 Sicilian rebellion, 123 Sieyès, Emmanuel, 84 Simcoe, John Graves, 195 Siochrú , Micheál Ó, 115, 121–2 Skinner, Quentin, 78 Smith, Adam, 171–2, 182–3, 210 Social Contract (Rousseau), 83 Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Moore), 204 “Some Social Requistes of Democracy” (Lipset), 204 South Africa, 172 South Carolina, 219 sovereignty, 2, 16, 31–2, 35, 123 fragmented, 183 parliamentary, 116, 123, 221, 224n15 popular, 215 Spain, 4, 16n3, 49, 89, 149–69, 183, 184, 205, 220 Spanish Comisión de Millones, 13, 155–6, 160, 163–4 Spanish Cortes of Castile, 3–4, 12–13, 149–69, 205, 207 “gap in,” 162–3

235

Spanish Cortes of Toledo, 153–4 Spanish Council of Finance, 155, 160, 164 Spanish Council of Orders, 155 Spanish Council of the Indies, 155 Spanish Councils of State, 159 Spanish Diputación de las Alcabalas, 164 Spanish Diputacion del Reino, 13, 155, 156, 163–4 Spanish encabezadas, 155 Spanish encabezamiento of the alcabalas, 155, 163, 166n11 Spanish Junta de Asistentes, 155, 161 Spanish Junta de Cortes, 155, 157 Spanish Junta of the Councils of State and Castile, 159 Spence, Thomas, 37 Speyer bishopric, 99 Stamp Act (1765), 219 state building, 46, 54–9, 135, 183, 203–4, 206–7, 212 domain- vs. tax-, 139 see also nation Steele, Beverley, 198 Stokes, Susan, 204 Strasburg, 99, 108n22 Stuart, Lady Mary, 65 Stuart kings, 5, 116, 123, 175, 179, 218 Subsidy Acts (1624, 1640, 1641), 49, 51 Sweden-Finland, 2, 4, 11–12, 133–7, 141–5, 146n3, 204, 205, 211, 220 Swedish Riksdag, 11–12, 141–3, 220 Swedish state council, 141 Switzerland, 98 Sydney, Algernon, 5, 34, 194–5 Talbot brothers, 118

236

Index

taxation and subsidies, 2, 5–6 American colonies and, 14, 35, 177–8, 182, 219 Britain and, 6, 25, 46–51 Canada and, 189, 190, 194 Denmark and, 11, 139–40, 144–5 France and, 78 Germany and, 9 Ireland and, 119 Spain and, 12–13, 153–64, 166n11, 167–8n35 Sweden and, 144 Temple, William Johnson, 64 Test Act (1673), 15, 190, 198 Thelwall, John, 36–7 “Third Estate,” 78, 82–5 Thirty Years War, 9, 11, 94, 101, 139, 204 Thomas, Robert P., 205 Tilly, Charles, 203 Tobago, 181 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 215–16, 221–2 Toland, John, 34 Toledo, Archbishop of, 161 Torrance, John, 59 Tory party, British, 53, 55, 58, 72 Tousignant, Pierre, 192, 194 trade, 203, 207, 210 trading companies, 13–14, 172–3 Trenchard, John, 34 Triennaial Act (1641), 5, 48 Trient, 98 Trier, 99 tripartite government, 179 Tucker, Robert W., 224n13 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 82–4, 89, 208 Turnbull, Gordon, 7, 63–73 Tyrrell, James, 34 Ulster, 119, 207 Union Act (1841), 197 United States, 84–5, 221 direct ballot initiatives, 88–9 voting rights in, 205

U.S. Congress, 221–2 U.S. Senate, 221 unity, 76, 82–3 “of will,” 7, 76, 208 Upper Canada, 15, 195, 197, 209 Upper Canadian Assembly, 195, 196 urban corporations, 151 Urban VIII, Pope, 160, 166n13 Van Kley, Dale, 84 Vasa, Gustav, King of Sweden, 11, 136, 143 Venetian Republic, 215 Virginia, 72, 176–7, 178 Virginia assembly, 14, 219 virtual representation, 29–30 Voltaire, 219 Wahlkapitulation, 105 Wales, 20 Walpole, Robert, 30–1, 33, 53, 55, 58 wars and warfare American system and, 221 Denmark vs. Sweden and, 11, 135–6, 139, 144–5 England and, 51–2, 54 France-Prussian, 85 modern state and, 203–4, 206 Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 114 Wealth of Natiions (Smith), 171 Weber, Max, 219 Wedderburn, Alex, 192 Weekly and Monthly Assessments, 50 Weidner, Marcus, 103 Wentworth, Sir Thomas, 10, 49, 117, 120–1, 123, 206–7 West Indies, 14, 174, 204, 209 Westmoreland, 64–5 Westphalia, 100, 102, 103 Wettin dynasty, 94 What is the Third Estate (Sieyès), 84 Whig party, British, 34, 46, 53, 58, 175, 189, 210

Index Wilkes, John, 5, 7, 68–72 William III, King of England, 52, 56 Williams, Anna, 70 Williams, David, 36 Williamson, Arthur, 129n44 Wolfe, Gen. James, 187 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 5, 36–7 women, 37–8, 102, 109n29 workers, 222

Worms, 99 Wraxall, Sir Nathaniel, 64 Wrightson, Keith, 211 Württemberg diet, 9, 94 Würzburg, 99 Wyndham, William, 53 York, Duke of (James II), 179 Zaller, Robert, 16, 215–24

237

Realities of Representation: State Building in Early Modern Europe and European America

Realities of Representation: State Building in Early Modern Europe and European America

State-building in Europe: The Revitalization of Western European Integration

Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe

Early Modern European Society

State Territoriality and European Integration (Europe and the Nation State)

The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe

The Early Modern European Economy

Declaring War in Early Modern Europe

The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe

Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict and European Transitions in Early Modern Europe

Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict and European Transitions in Early Modern Europe

Capitalists in Spite of Themselves : Elite Conflict and European Transitions in Early Modern Europe

Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe

Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe

The state & labor in modern America

Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe

Societal Breakdown and the Rise of the Early Modern State in Europe: Memory of the Future

Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe

The Empire State Building (Building America: Then and Now)

The Ottoman Empire and early modern Europe

The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe

Early Modern Europe: Issues and Interpretations

World-Building and the Early Modern Imagination

Early Modern Europe: Issues and Interpretations

The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe

Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe

Cultural History of Early Modern European Streets

Cohesion Policy in the European Union: The Building of Europe

Realities of Representation: State Building in Early Modern Europe and European America